arXiv:2608. 01184v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Data-free continual model merging must incorporate a stream of specialized models while retaining both pretrained general knowledge and previously acquired tasks, without access to task data.
arXiv:2605. 20247v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Catastrophic forgetting remains a major obstacle to continual learning in large language models (LLMs) and vision--language models (VLMs).
arXiv:2608.31096v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Class-incremental learning (CIL) requires a model to incrementally learn tasks that contain new classes without accessing earlier training data while...
arXiv:2606. 07500v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning in Large Language Models (LLMs) is hindered by the plasticity-stability dilemma, where acquiring new capabilities often leads to catastrophic forgetting of previous knowledge.
CAMFT is a Conflict‑Aware Mergeable Fine‑Tuning method designed to make task adaptation efficient and merge‑aware for large language models. Unlike existing approaches that only resolve parameter conflicts after fine‑tuning, CAMFT shapes mergeability during training by guiding each task to update sparse coordinates with lower cross‑task conflict. Experiments show that CAMFT outperforms standard fine‑tuning baselines in multi‑task merging scenarios.
The paper introduces PIECE, a Parameter Importance-Driven Continual Learning method that selectively updates only 0.1% of core parameters to preserve general abilities while learning new domain knowledge. PIECE employs two importance estimators—PIECE‑F using Fisher Information and PIECE‑S combining gradient and curvature information—to guide updates. Experiments on three language models and two multimodal models demonstrate that PIECE maintains general capabilities and achieves state‑of‑the‑art continual learning performance without accessing prior training data or adding parameter overhead.
arXiv:2608. 16345v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pre-trained models (PTMs) provide a strong foundation for continual learning by offering stable representations that facilitate lightweight adaptation to new tasks.
arXiv:2606. 16501v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model merging has become a practical post-training strategy for building a single multi-task large language model (LLM) by combining multiple task-specialized models.
Merge++ is a post‑hoc refinement technique for model merging that synthesizes task‑representative images by inverting expert checkpoints and then distills expert knowledge into a merged model. It operates without any additional data beyond the checkpoints and can be applied universally across existing weight‑space merging algorithms. Experiments show consistent improvements, with average gains of +2 to +8 points and up to +25.9 on specific configurations.
arXiv:2609.17026v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning must balance the learning of new knowledge with the retention of previously learned knowledge to incrementally learn tasks from a da...
Multi-task model merging aims to consolidate several task-specific experts into a unified model, yet static merging consistently suffers from parameter interference. While dynamic merging models aim to bridge this gap, many works rely on the costly storage and loading of redundant expert components at inference.
The paper introduces Forgetting Only What Matters via Unlearning Layers (FOM-UL), a layer‑selective unlearning framework for large language models. FOM-UL uses a forget‑to‑retain significance score to identify transformer layers that strongly influence the forget set while being insensitive to the retain set, allowing targeted updates that preserve most of the model. Experiments on TOFU, KnowUnDo, and MUSE-style benchmarks show that FOM-UL reduces residual memorization and maintains utility better than several baselines, even after 8‑bit and 4‑bit post‑training quantization, and it also limits recovery of forgotten content in adversarial prompt tests.
arXiv:2510.21175v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs), such as CLIP, have demonstrated remarkable zero-shot generalization, enabling deployment in a wide range...