Replay on Demand: An Emergent Curriculum for Balancing Adaptation and Forgetting in Continued Pretraining
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
arXiv:2607. 15587v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning studies how deployed language models can continually acquire new tasks without expensive retraining from scratch.
arXiv:2603. 11395v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual reinforcement learning challenges agents to acquire new skills while retaining previously learned ones with the goal of improving performance in both past and future tasks.
The paper introduces Spaced Repetition Training (SRT), a continual learning framework that adapts review scheduling for language models by using the SM-2 algorithm to decide which past examples to replay. SRT tracks per-example review states and maps perplexity to a recall-quality signal, allowing the model to retain old knowledge while consolidating new information without changing the underlying model or training objective. Experiments on Wikipedia and code corpora show that SRT improves the stability-plasticity trade‑off, recovers 5–37 percentage points of lost accuracy, and maintains benchmark performance better than naive continual pre‑training or uniform replay; similar benefits are observed in vision and tabular data when an appropriate recall signal is used.
The paper introduces Spaced Repetition Training (SRT), a continual learning framework that schedules sample rehearsal using the SM-2 algorithm. SRT tracks per-example review states and maps perplexity to recall quality, allowing the training loop to decide which examples to replay and when. Experiments on Wikipedia and code corpora show that SRT improves the stability‑plasticity trade‑off, recovers 5–37 percentage points of lost old‑knowledge accuracy, and preserves benchmark performance better than naive continual pre‑training or uniform replay.
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?
arXiv:2606. 00400v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual instruction tuning updates a language model through a sequence of new domains, yet each update can progressively erode previously learned capabilities and alignment behavior.