arXiv Machine Learning

When Synthetic Data Hurts: On Catastrophic Forgetting in Skill Retrieval for LLM Agents

The paper investigates how synthetic data used for fine‑tuning large language model (LLM) skill routers can lead to catastrophic forgetting of real and out‑of‑distribution (OOD) skills. By evaluating a production router with 34,396 skills, the authors show that synthetic‑data fine‑tuning improves in‑distribution retrieval but degrades performance on real and OOD data. They test several continual‑learning inspired mitigation methods—embedding‑anchor regularization, Learning without Forgetting, Elastic Weight Consolidation, and L2‑initialization—and find that these approaches both preserve OOD retrieval performance and boost synthetic in‑distribution retrieval by up to 13.98% for a 0.6B Qwen retriever and reranker.

arXiv AI
Aug 11

Beyond Static Models: An Evolving Framework for Continual Learning in Large Language Models across Training Stages

arXiv:2603. 12658v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual learning (CL) has emerged as a pivotal paradigm to enable large language models (LLMs) to dynamically adapt to evolving knowledge and sequential tasks while mitigating catastrophic forgetting, a critical limitation of the static pre-training paradigm inherent to modern LLMs.

By Hongyang Chen, Zhongwu Sun, Hongfei Ye, Kunchi Li, Xuemin Lin
arXiv Machine Learning
3d ago

Realistic Continual Learning Approach using Pre-trained Models

arXiv:2404.07729v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continual learning (CL) evaluates adaptability in learning solutions to retain knowledge. Our research addresses the challenge of catastrophic forg...

By Nadia Nasri, Carlos Guti\'errez-\'Alvarez, Sergio Lafuente-Arroyo, Saturnino Maldonado-Basc\'on, Roberto J. L\'opez-Sastre