The paper investigates continual machine unlearning, where models must forget data over time. It identifies a fundamental issue called plasticity collapse, where successive unlearning requests cause geometric constraints that saturate parameter space, leading to two failure modes: forward failure (reduced forgetting quality) and backward failure (re‑memorization). Experiments across architectures and datasets confirm that plasticity collapse is a pervasive problem in continual unlearning.
By Yingdan Shi, Xiang Xu, Kaize Ding, Alfred O. Hero, Ren Wang
arXiv:2609.17026v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Continual learning must balance the learning of new knowledge with the retention of previously learned knowledge to incrementally learn tasks from a da...
By Yunxiang Fu, Meng Lou, Zicheng Liao, Yizhou Yu
arXiv:2607. 05609v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Continual Learning (CL) literature has long been driven by the goal of mitigating catastrophic forgetting.
By Giulia Lanzillotta, Mandana Samiei, Doina Precup, Razvan Pascanu, Claire Vernade
arXiv:2504. 01219v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Neural networks are notorious for forgetting old skills when taught new ones - a problem known as catastrophic forgetting.
By Grzegorz Rype\'s\'c
The paper argues that catastrophic forgetting and loss of plasticity alone cannot explain why naive sequential training underperforms offline joint training. It introduces data co-observation as a third factor, showing that observing training data together consistently improves performance across supervised and self-supervised settings. The study also reinterprets common continual learning methods, suggesting that memory replay’s success stems from restoring co-observation benefits rather than merely mitigating forgetting.
By Timm Hess, Abhishek Jha, Gido M. van de Ven, Tinne Tuytelaars
arXiv:2504. 13822v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The emergence of large pre-trained networks has revolutionized the AI field, unlocking new possibilities and achieving unprecedented performance.
By Eric Nuertey Coleman, Luigi Quarantiello, Ziyue Liu, Qinwen Yang, Samrat Mukherjee, Julio Hurtado, Vincenzo Lomonaco