arXiv:2601. 13020v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual instruction tuning (CIT) requires multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to adapt to a stream of tasks without forgetting prior capabilities.
By Zhiyan Hou, Haiyun Guo, Haokai Ma, Yandu Sun, Yonghui Yang, Jinqiao Wang
arXiv:2608. 01997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-optimizer training is a poor fit for the distinct phases of deep network optimization: adaptive methods handle noisy early gradients well but overshoot flat minima, while SGD with momentum generalizes better in the late phase but converges slowly early on.
By Alok Kumar Pandey, Umang Chaturvedi, Aatish Rana, Gopi Krishna Nedanuri
arXiv:2606. 27759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training binary neural networks (BNNs) from scratch is dominated by the straight-through estimator (STE), whose forward/backward mismatch produces severe accuracy degradation as networks deepen.
By Evan Gibson Smith, Bashima Islam
arXiv:2601. 18699v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sequential fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) adaptation to target tasks often triggers catastrophic forgetting, where the acquisition of novel target skills degrades ancestral capabilities.
By Gustav Olaf Yunus Laitinen-Fredriksson Lundstrom-Imanov
arXiv:2607. 09202v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning commonly relies on post-hoc mechanisms such as replay, elastic regularization, or distillation.
By Julius St\"ork
arXiv:2607. 17944v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce CMP (Cognitive Memory Primitive), an architecture that represents inputs as sparse relational codes, stores them in a two-tier competitive memory, and learns entirely through local, gradient-free updates, with no backpropagation anywhere in the network.
By Ashmith Atmuri, Akshay Kumar, Yashaswini Rao Bhogarajula
arXiv:2605. 29547v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning optimization relies heavily on the assumption of smooth loss landscapes, a condition systematically violated by modern architectures due to non-smooth components such as ReLU activations and quantization operators.
By Ruoran Xu, Borong She, Xiaobo Jin, Qiufeng Wang
arXiv:2608. 11690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning must absorb new tasks without erasing old ones, and replay---mixing a small buffer of past examples into current training---is among the most effective remedies for catastrophic forgetting.
By Tieliang Gong, Zhongbo Zhang, Wen Wen, Yong-Jin Liu
arXiv:2411. 16073v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inspired by the Well-initialized Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (WLTH), we introduce Soft-TransFormers (Soft-TF), a continual learning framework that adapts a frozen pre-trained Transformer through task-specific soft subnetworks: real-valued multiplicative masks over the query, key, value, and output projections of selected self-attention layers.
By Haeyong Kang, Chang D. Yoo
arXiv:2606. 25971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern neural network training relies on optimizers such as Adam and Muon which act on each weight matrix as a single object.
By Alexander H\"agele, Alejandro Hern\'andez-Cano, Atli Kosson, Martin Jaggi
arXiv:2606. 10406v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We argue that forgetting is not confined to continual learning but is a general optimization phenomenon: during standard training, dominant mini-batch gradients suppress rare but useful update directions, causing short-term forgetting at every step.
By Toan Nguyen, Yang Liu, Trung Le, Celso de Melo, Flora D. Salim
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