arXiv:2602. 03846v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We develop a continual learning method for pretrained models that \emph{requires no access to old-task data}, addressing a practical barrier in foundation model adaptation where pretraining distributions are often unavailable.
By Romain Cosentino
arXiv:2608. 01130v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A broad range of models face the mismatch where they are updated through trajectory losses but are evaluated by downstream task reward.
By Yuyang Shen
arXiv:2606. 30852v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reasoning models spend different amounts of useful computation across instances, but it remains unclear when a learned stopping rule improves over simple confidence or convergence thresholds.
By Zhe Dong (University of Maine at Presque Isle), Fang Qin (Stanford University), Manish Shah (Independent Researcher)
arXiv:2608. 14465v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A frozen language model on reasoning tasks has two coupled weaknesses: it under-uses evidence its own residual stream already encodes, and it fails to detect when the input is insufficient to answer, so it confabulates.
By Ziyang Luo, Zhongyao Chu, Xinjie He, Youting Wang, Xukui Qin, Runxiong Wu, Yan-Syuan Chen
arXiv:2607. 25063v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Developers judge a model checkpoint by how it behaves.
By Cen Lu, Yung-Chen Tang, Andrea Cavallaro
arXiv:2607. 16568v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Function-preserving network growth techniques such as Net2Net and progressive stacking expand a model's capacity without destroying its learned function, but existing formulations either tolerate numerical perturbations or require a full rebuild of the training program.
By Abdallah Khemais (ISITCOM, University of Sousse)
arXiv:2606. 03808v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We propose PURGE, a machine unlearning algorithm built on a simple but an under-exploited observation: continual learning (CL) and machine unlearning (MU) which are fundamentally dual problems.
By Vedant Jawandhia, Daksh Ahuja, Ghufran Alam Siddiqui, Prashant Trivedi, Yash Sinha, Pratik Narang
Safety alignment in large language models can be fragile under fine-tuning, as even benign task adaptation may increase harmful compliance. Existing defenses mainly follow two directions: they either intervene during or after fine-tuning through retraining or weight modification, which can be costly and may hurt task performance, or they use model-agnostic safety classifiers, which may miss failures specific to a given fine-tuned checkpoint.
arXiv:2604. 21395v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Ordinary supervised training minimises the task loss and then stops.
By Vishal Rajput
arXiv:2607. 16821v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Task arithmetic, sequential fine-tuning, activation steering, and first-order random search all operate through relatively small perturbations around an already trained checkpoint, and they rely on different local approximations: individual perturbations should be first-order predictable, task updates should compose with controlled interference, useful tangent structure should be stable and possible to estimate, and weight edits should have counterparts in representation space.
By Irina Piontkovskaia, Sergey Nikolenko
arXiv:2602. 09689v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Fine-tuning large pre-trained models on a target distribution often improves in-distribution (ID) accuracy, but at the cost of out-of-distribution (OOD) robustness as representations specialize to the fine-tuning data.
By Alireza Abdollahpoorrostam, Nikolaos Dimitriadis, Adam Hazimeh, Pascal Frossard
arXiv:2608. 14717v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A query-relation deletion can improve the edited slot while reducing the utility of the prediction set that contains it.
By Ze Zhang, Yang Zhang