arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

From a Prompt to Repertoires: Evolving Functional REpertoires Enable LLM Continual Learning

The paper introduces Evolving Functional REpertoires (EFRE), a method that replaces a single prompt with a dynamic set of functions to enable large language models to learn new tasks sequentially without forgetting. EFRE refines existing functions when updates are compatible and creates new ones when updates conflict, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting and overfitting. Experiments on a three‑task continual‑learning stream show EFRE outperforms GRPO by 7.50 percentage points and reduces performance drop on a subsequent task by only 1.56 percentage points compared to base prompt optimization.

By Fengyuan Liu, Yue Wang, Hangxi Guo, Fengyuan Liu, Chenxu Wu, Yanguang Liu, Mengnan Du
arXiv AI
Sep 28

Estimating and Orthogonalizing Unknown Pre-training Gradients for Continual Fine-tuning of Large Language Models

The paper introduces EoupCT, a framework that estimates and orthogonalizes unknown pre‑training gradients to mitigate catastrophic forgetting during continual fine‑tuning of large language models. It generates pseudo data most susceptible to forgetting using a learnable soft prompt with Gumbel‑Softmax, then jointly optimizes model parameters and the prompt via a first‑order Pareto optimizer to enforce orthogonality between new task updates and the estimated gradients. Experiments on multiple LLMs show that EoupCT preserves both task‑specific performance and the models’ inherent general‑purpose knowledge.

By Bing Wang, Changchun Li, Xin-Qiang Cai, Lin Yuanbo Wu, Ximing Li, Gang Niu, Masashi Sugiyama