Continual post-training enables foundation models to acquire new knowledge while preserving existing capabilities. Recent work suggests that on-policy learning can mitigate forgetting, with on-policy self-distillation emerging as a particularly attractive approach.
arXiv:2601. 19897v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continual learning, enabling models to acquire new skills and knowledge without degrading existing capabilities, remains a fundamental challenge for foundation models.
By Idan Shenfeld, Mehul Damani, Jonas H\"ubotter, Pulkit Agrawal
arXiv:2607. 07847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, the next question is how can we enable models to continually learn?
By Anne Harrington, Nayan Saxena, Michael Murphy, Anastasia Borovykh, Zeyu Yun, Sridhar Kamath, Ara Eindra Kyi, Trevor Darrell, Jitendra Malik, Yutong Bai
arXiv:2608. 12957v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) learns from reward differences within a rollout group, but receives no useful relative signal when every sampled response is incorrect.
By Yubo Zhang, Xinhong Ma, Zezhong Tan, Ziqiang Dong
arXiv:2608. 09745v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD) converts feedback into dense token-level supervision on trajectories generated by the policy to be optimized, providing a useful complement to reinforcement learning with sparse outcome rewards.
By Zhuo Sun, Entong Li, Yanlong Zhao, Xiaoyuan Cheng, Wenxuan Yuan, Kaiyu Li, Che Liu, Huihang Liu, Harrison Bo Hua Zhu, Li Zeng
arXiv:2608. 04794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation (SD) has emerged as a compute-efficient alternative to reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards: a self-teacher, conditioned on privileged information (PI) about the answer such as a reference solution, supplies dense per-token supervision to a student that never sees it.
By Sarthak Harne, Chinmay Karkar, Yash Pandya, Ahmed Awadallah, Akshay Nambi
arXiv:2607. 15587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning studies how deployed language models can continually acquire new tasks without expensive retraining from scratch.
By Yang Meng, Zhenya Liu, Zhuokai Zhao, Yuxin Chen
arXiv:2407. 13911v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Prompt-based continual learning has shown strong performance in rehearsal-free class-incremental learning by adapting learnable prompts while freezing a pre-trained Vision Transformer (ViT) backbone.
By Qifan Zhang, Yunhui Guo, Yu Xiang
arXiv:2608. 13040v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Enabling agents to learn from experience and internalize it into their policy has become a central problem in self-evolving AI.
By Guibin Zhang, Jiayang Lyu, Ran Sun, Xinlei Yu, Haoyu Zhao, Qibing Ren, Shuicheng Yan
arXiv:2607. 18955v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has substantially improved the reasoning capabilities of large language models on tasks such as mathematical reasoning and code generation.
By Qiye Cai, Yichuan Ma, Linyang Li, Peiji Li, Yongkang Chen, Qipeng Guo, Yicheng Zou, Tao Gui, Xiaocheng Feng, Bing Qin
arXiv:2607. 04364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual post-training is becoming a central paradigm for adapting vision-language models to evolving tasks.
By Mao-Lin Luo, Zhe-Xu Wang, Zi-Hao Zhou, Bo Ye, Jian Zhao, Min-Ling Zhang, Tong Wei
arXiv:2608. 07068v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon agents accumulate growing contexts during interaction, impairing performance and stability.
By Zhiyuan Liu, Tinghong Ye, Chenghao Liu, Yizhuo Li, Songfang Huang