arXiv Machine Learning

Least but not Last: Fine-tuning Intermediate Principal Components for Better Performance-Forgetting Trade-Offs

arXiv AI
Oct 1

Foundation-Preserving Optimization in Generalized Eigenspace

The paper introduces Foundation Preserving LoRA (FoLoRA), a forgetting‑aware optimization framework that balances adaptation to downstream tasks with preservation of pretraining capabilities. FoLoRA uses a first‑order preservation condition to define a forgetting penalty based on pretraining‑proxy activations and a task utility from downstream activations, scoring update directions via a generalized Rayleigh quotient. This spectral coordinate system enables gated Adam updates that reduce low‑utility, high‑penalty directions, and the method constructs pretraining proxy calibration data by sampling from the pretrained model. Experiments on math, code, and instruction‑following tasks demonstrate that FoLoRA achieves a stronger balance between target task performance and aggregate preservation of non‑target capabilities compared to baselines.

By Dongjun Kim, Adrian de Wynter, Huancheng Chen, Heasung Kim, Haris Vikalo
arXiv AI
Oct 16

CRAFT: Forgetting-Aware Intervention-Based Adaptation for Continual Learning

CRAFT is a continual learning framework that freezes model weights and learns low‑rank interventions on hidden representations to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Tasks that are similar share an intervention, determined by how they change the model’s output distribution, and a KL penalty keeps new tasks close to existing behavior. The approach also allows task identification at test time without explicit labels and shows improved performance and reduced forgetting across benchmarks compared to LoRA‑based methods.

By Md Anwar Hossen, Fatema Siddika, Juan Pablo Munoz, Tanya Roosta, Ali Jannesari
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Estimating and Orthogonalizing Unknown Pre-training Gradients for Continual Fine-tuning of Large Language Models

The paper introduces EoupCT, a framework that estimates and orthogonalizes unknown pre‑training gradients to mitigate catastrophic forgetting during continual fine‑tuning of large language models. It generates pseudo data most susceptible to forgetting using a learnable soft prompt with Gumbel‑Softmax, then jointly optimizes model parameters and the prompt via a first‑order Pareto optimizer to enforce orthogonality between new task updates and the estimated gradients. Experiments on multiple LLMs show that EoupCT preserves both task‑specific performance and the models’ inherent general‑purpose knowledge.

By Bing Wang, Changchun Li, Xin-Qiang Cai, Lin Yuanbo Wu, Ximing Li, Gang Niu, Masashi Sugiyama
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

C-LoRA: Continual Low-Rank Adaptation for Pre-trained Visual Models

C-LoRA introduces a continual learning approach for pre‑trained visual models that uses a single shared Low‑Rank Adaptation (LoRA) adapter. It employs a learnable routing matrix split into a stability component (R_base) and a plasticity component (R_delta) to balance preserving past knowledge and adapting to new tasks. This design eliminates the need for expanding modules or complex inference fusion while maintaining competitive performance on multiple benchmarks.

By Xin Zhang, Liang Bai, Xian Yang
arXiv AI
Oct 2

Local Support Learning

arXiv:2610.02126v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We explore catastrophic forgetting in the context of large pre-trained models. By considering forgetting as a geometric problem in the input space of...

By Assaf Ben-Kish, Akarsh Kumar, James Glass, Raja Giryes
arXiv AI
Oct 16

Towards Continual Learning: Mitigating Forgetting With Subspace Tuning

The paper introduces Subspace Tuning (SST), a fine‑tuning technique that restricts weight updates to the bottom singular subspace of model parameters, thereby protecting the principal directions that are most prone to catastrophic forgetting. SST is optimizer‑agnostic, works with existing fine‑tuning recipes such as SFT and self‑distillation, and includes dense gradient estimation and a refresh mechanism to enhance learning. Experiments show that SST can preserve up to 99 % of the weight subspace, significantly reduce KL drift, and nearly eliminate forgetting in large‑scale language models while maintaining strong target‑task performance.

By Arnav Chavan, Kusha Sareen, Rishabh Tiwari, Abhranil Chandra, Johan Obando-Ceron, Kurt Keutzer, Scott Niekum, Inderjit S Dhillon, Devvrit Khatri