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:2607. 01763v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual post-training enables foundation models to acquire new knowledge while preserving existing capabilities.
By Meng Wang, Haohan Zhao, Wenzhuo Liu, Lu Yang, Geng Liu, Haiyang Guo, Guo-Sen Xie, Gaofeng Meng, Hongbin Liu, Fei Zhu
arXiv:2609.24646v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: On-policy self-distillation fine-tuning (SDFT) learns new skills from demonstrations while reducing forgetting, but it always distils toward the full d...
By Ahmed Khaled Khamis, Xiaotong Ji, Hassan Jaber, Rasul Tutunov, Matthieu Zimmer, Jun Wang, Haitham Bou-Ammar
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
Post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) with Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become an important tool for improving model capabilities, but the LLM action-space structure introduces challenges distinct from classical RL, with implications for inducing exploration. New methods are required that leverage the broad knowledge and flexibility of pre-trained LLMs to deliberately generate diverse experience at training time.
arXiv:2602. 02244v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The standard post-training recipe for large reasoning models, supervised fine-tuning followed by reinforcement learning (SFT-then-RL), may limit the benefits of the RL stage: while SFT imitates expert demonstrations, it often causes overconfidence and reduces generation diversity, leaving RL with a narrowed solution space to explore.
By Hao Wang, Hao Gu, Hongming Piao, Kaixiong Gong, Yuxiao Ye, Xiangyu Yue, Sirui Han, Yike Guo, Dapeng Wu
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
The paper introduces temporal self‑distillation for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), proposing that a policy can learn from a stronger future checkpoint of itself. Two methods—Near‑Future Policy Optimization (NPO) and Near‑Future Policy Distillation (NPD)—use verified future‑self trajectories and token‑level transfer, respectively, while AutoNPO adaptively selects the optimal future checkpoint. Experiments on eight image‑text benchmarks show that near‑future teachers yield higher performance than far‑future ones, indicating that the balance between new capability and learner compatibility is key.
By Chuanyu Qin, Chenxu Yang, Qingyi Si, Naibin Gu, Dingyu Yao, Zheng Lin, Peng Fu, Nan Duan, Jiaqi Wang
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
arXiv:2608. 02087v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) with Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become an important tool for improving model capabilities, but the LLM action-space structure introduces challenges distinct from classical RL, with implications for inducing exploration.
By Jim Dilkes, Vahid Yazdanpanah, Sebastian Stein
arXiv:2608. 09555v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: External natural-language skills provide large language model (LLM) agents with reusable and editable guidance for solving complex tasks.
By Tianjun Pan, Yuan Li, Hongda Wang, Linbo Jin, Mengfei Song, Lei Gao, Qiming Shi, Shaokang Fu, Jiarong Zhao, Chengyu Wang, Chengfu Huo
arXiv:2510. 18874v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Adapting language models (LMs) to new tasks via post-training carries the risk of degrading existing capabilities -- a phenomenon classically known as catastrophic forgetting.
By Howard Chen, Noam Razin, Karthik Narasimhan, Danqi Chen