arXiv Machine Learning

Beyond Endpoint Scores: Time- and Capacity-Conditioned Evaluation of Continual Knowledge Updating

The paper argues that evaluating continual knowledge‑updating methods solely at a final checkpoint and a single adapter rank can be misleading. By fixing a periodic hierarchy and comparing it to cumulative replay on a 24‑month Wikidata stream, the authors show that the apparent best method changes depending on the evaluation month, replay LoRA rank, and query formulation. They recommend reporting performance trajectories and capacity sweeps, and only declaring a robust winner when the ranking remains stable across the evaluation region.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Return or Revise? Learning When Revision Helps Retrieval-Augmented QA

The paper investigates when it is better to return an existing draft answer or revise it using retrieved evidence in retrieval‑augmented QA systems. By grading both the draft and its candidate revision with the same correctness judge, the authors define a paired effect called recoverability and train policies to predict it before revision. Experiments on 25,870 open‑domain questions show that a recoverability‑based scorer outperforms a draft‑correctness scorer across multiple Llama setups, improving accuracy–revision trade‑offs and closing a significant portion of the oracle gap, though it still applies harmful revisions in a substantial fraction of cases.

By Nicholas Kashani Motlagh, Tim Anderson, Jeremy Gwinnup, Grant Erdmann
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 28

CAMR: Compatibility-Aware Memory Replay for Continual Learning in Large Language Models

CAMR (Compatibility-Aware Memory Replay) is an adaptive framework for continual learning in large language models that jointly manages supervision of new examples and replay of historical data. It uses compatibility checks and a learned memory gate to decide among three actions: general replay of incoming examples, reinforcing compatible related examples, and skipping supervision for mastered duplicates. Evaluated on Qwen3-8B-Base, CAMR outperforms existing methods on WikiBigEdit factual updates and achieves top scores on multiple TRACE tasks while preserving earlier-task performance across diverse domains.

By Jingpu Yang, Tianhao Li, Fengxian Ji, Yufeng Wang, Shuxin Zheng, Xiaoqing Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 16

LSREP: A Longitudinal State-Replay Protocol for Evaluating Conversational Memory, with ICE v2 as an Audited Local-First Architecture

The paper introduces LSREP, a Longitudinal State‑Replay Evaluation Protocol designed to assess how conversational memory evolves over time, incorporating ordered replay, lifecycle schedules, repeated probes, evolving reference answers, and mechanism‑fidelity checks. It applies LSREP to ICE v2, a local‑first memory middleware, and reports that on three ordinary‑density datasets ICE v2 achieves near‑zero mean quality difference from vector‑RAG while using fewer fragments but slightly more prompt tokens, yet fails catastrophically on a dense dataset. In a public diagnostic, ICE v2 underperforms pure vector‑RAG on LongMemEval, revealing significant multi‑session and temporal failures and a quality‑cost trade‑off rather than superior efficiency.

By Deepesh Sonar
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

What Matters for Aggressive Decoding-Time KV Eviction? Temporal Aggregation and Ranking Preservation

The paper investigates how temporal aggregation of token scores during decoding-time KV cache compression affects eviction decisions. It shows that using an exponential‑moving‑average (EMA) aggregation keeps ranking changes minimal for many scorer variants, while others like KeyDiff or recency significantly alter rankings and degrade performance. Building on this, the authors propose InertiaKV and its lazy variant, which achieve 1.34–1.46× faster decoding than full refresh, and also evaluate a score‑free approach that slightly improves quality while eliminating further scoring.

arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 28

Beyond Update Counts: A Control Map for Evaluating Test-Time Model Updates

The paper introduces the Control Map, an evaluation framework for test‑time model updates that records the specific updates made before each answer and separately assesses acquisition, retention, locality, and performance in new settings. It demonstrates that update scheduling can dramatically affect accuracy, that learning an edit does not guarantee lasting or contained changes, and that no single editor consistently outperforms others across models and benchmarks. The authors argue that evaluations should report update histories and assess these dimensions separately.

By Zehao Zhao, Shangjian Yin, Rui Liu, Chongyang Bai, Mark Ibrahim, Kavosh Asadi, Yuchen Lu, Hang Cui, Hamed Firooz
arXiv AI
Sep 4

What Matters for Aggressive Decoding-Time KV Eviction? Temporal Aggregation and Ranking Preservation

The paper investigates how temporal aggregation and ranking preservation affect aggressive decoding-time KV cache eviction. It shows that exponential‑moving‑average (EMA) aggregation makes many scorer modifications indistinguishable at the eviction‑set level, while certain variants (KeyDiff, key norm, recency, learned scorer) alter rankings and degrade performance. Building on this, the authors propose InertiaKV and its lazy variant, achieving 1.34–1.46× faster decoding, and also explore a score‑free decoding approach that slightly improves quality while eliminating further scoring.

By Bo Zeng, Yu Zhao, Yefeng Liu, Zhihong Lu, Xuanfan Ni, Xintong Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Matched Excess-Outranker Regularization for Candidate-Set Interference in Continual Knowledge Graph Embedding

The paper introduces Matched Excess-Outranker Regularization (MEOR), a new host-level objective for continual knowledge graph embedding that addresses candidate-set interference caused by entity admission. MEOR compares newcomer pressure with matched old references, applying a one-sided penalty only when newcomers outcompete these references, thereby preserving the learner’s signal for legitimate new entities. Experiments on ENTITY-ComplEx and FBInc datasets show that MEOR improves historical current-universe mean reciprocal rank and reduces candidate-set interference, outperforming several baseline regularizers.

By Hao Ren, Junbin Gao, Jiaojiao Jiang
arXiv AI
Aug 24

UpgradeBench: A Decision-Centric Benchmark for Upgrading Fine-Tuned LLM Specialists

UpgradeBench is a decision‑centric longitudinal benchmark that evaluates how fine‑tuned language‑model specialists should be handled when new base‑model releases occur. It covers four consecutive Qwen releases, a continuation checkpoint, six tasks, two model sizes, and OLMo checkpoints with known training lineage, and examines whether retraining, adapter transfer, or other recovery strategies improve specialist performance. The benchmark reveals that upgrade gains vary by task and release interval, that direct adapter copying is sensitive to pretraining distance, and that teacher relabeling can recover specialists without new annotations. "whyItMatters":"The study provides actionable insights into the cost‑effective management of specialist models across model releases, showing how to balance retraining effort with performance gains."

By Ye Chen, Weining Zhang