The continual learning capability of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for advancing artificial general intelligence. However, continual fine-tuning LLMs across various domains often suffers from catastrophic forgetting, characterized by: 1) significant forgetting of their general capabilities, and 2) sharp performance declines in previously learned tasks. To simultaneously address both issues in a simple yet stable manner, we propose General Sample Replay (GeRe), a framework that use usual pretraining texts for efficient anti-forgetting. Beyond revisiting the most prevalent replay-based practices under GeRe, we further leverage neural states to introduce a enhanced activation states constrained optimization method using threshold-based margin (TM) loss, which maintains activation state consistency during replay learning. We are the first to validate that a small, fixed set of pre-collected general replay samples is sufficient to resolve both concerns--retaining general capabilities while promoting overall performance across sequential tasks. Indeed, the former can inherently facilitate the latter. Through controlled experiments, we systematically compare TM with different replay strategies under the GeRe framework, including vanilla label fitting, logit imitation via KL divergence and feature imitation via L1/L2 losses. Results demonstrate that TM consistently improves performance and exhibits better robustness. Our work paves the way for efficient replay of LLMs for the future. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Qznan/GeRe.
FOREVER: Forgetting Curve-Inspired Memory Replay for Language Model Continual Learning
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（香港理工大学）；ShineMo Ltd., China（中国 ShineMo 公司）；Solar System of OVB, Tencent, China（腾讯 OVB 太阳系中国）；Peking University（北京大学）；University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Illinois Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）
University of Pisa（比萨大学）；Scuola Normale Superiore（比萨高等师范学校）
Replay strategies are Continual Learning techniques which mitigate catastrophic forgetting by keeping a buffer of patterns from previous experiences, which are interleaved with new data during training. The amount of patterns stored in the buffer is a critical parameter which largely influences the final performance and the memory footprint of the approach. This work introduces Distilled Replay, a novel replay strategy for Continual Learning which is able to mitigate forgetting by keeping a very small buffer (1 pattern per class) of highly informative samples. Distilled Replay builds the buffe…
Humans learn all their life long. They accumulate knowledge from a sequence of learning experiences and remember the essential concepts without forgetting what they have learned previously. Artificial neural networks struggle to learn similarly. They often rely on data rigorously preprocessed to learn solutions to specific problems such as classification or regression. In particular, they forget their past learning experiences if trained on new ones. Therefore, artificial neural networks are often inept to deal with real-life settings such as an autonomous-robot that has to learn on-line to ad…
Large pre-trained language models help to achieve state of the art on a variety of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, nevertheless, they still suffer from forgetting when incrementally learning a sequence of tasks. To alleviate this problem, recent works enhance existing models by sparse experience replay and local adaption, which yield satisfactory performance. However, in this paper we find that pre-trained language models like BERT have a potential ability to learn sequentially, even without any sparse memory replay. To verify the ability of BERT to maintain old knowledge, we adopt an…
A lifelong learning agent is able to continually learn from potentially infinite streams of pattern sensory data. One major historic difficulty in building agents that adapt in this way is that neural systems struggle to retain previously-acquired knowledge when learning from new samples. This problem is known as catastrophic forgetting (interference) and remains an unsolved problem in the domain of machine learning to this day. While forgetting in the context of feedforward networks has been examined extensively over the decades, far less has been done in the context of alternative architectu…
Provable Effects of Data Replay in Continual Learning: A Feature Learning Perspective
School of Information Science and Technology, USTC and Institute of Artificial Intelligence, HCNSC（信息科学与技术学院，中国科学技术大学及人工智能研究所）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, SUNY at Buffalo（计算机科学与工程系，纽约州立大学布法罗分校）
We present Gaussian Mixture Replay (GMR), a rehearsal-based approach for continual learning (CL) based on Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM). CL approaches are intended to tackle the problem of catastrophic forgetting (CF), which occurs for Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) when sequentially training them on successive sub-tasks. GMR mitigates CF by generating samples from previous tasks and merging them with current training data. GMMs serve several purposes here: sample generation, density estimation (e.g., for detecting outliers or recognizing task boundaries) and providing a high-level feature repres…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Facebook AI（脸书人工智能研究院）；King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）
Lifelong learning requires models that can continuously learn from sequential streams of data without suffering catastrophic forgetting due to shifts in data distributions. Deep learning models have thrived in the non-sequential learning paradigm; however, when used to learn a sequence of tasks, they fail to retain past knowledge and learn incrementally. We propose a novel approach to lifelong learning of language tasks based on meta-learning with sparse experience replay that directly optimizes to prevent forgetting. We show that under the realistic setting of performing a single pass on a st…
Dual-LoRA and Quality-Enhanced Pseudo Replay for Multimodal Continual Food Learning
College of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Fudan University, China（复旦大学计算机科学与人工智能学院）；Singapore Management University, Singapore（新加坡国立管理学院）
Continual learning (CL) refers to a machine learning paradigm that learns continuously without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Thereby, major difficulty in CL is catastrophic forgetting of preceding tasks, caused by shifts in data distributions. Existing CL models often save a large number of old examples and stochastically revisit previously seen data to retain old knowledge. However, the occupied memory size keeps enlarging along with accumulating seen data. Hereby, we propose a memory-efficient CL method by storing a few samples to achieve good performance. We devise a dynamic pro…
Diffusion-Driven Data Replay: A Novel Approach to Combat Forgetting in Federated Class Continual Learning
China University of Petroleum（中国石油大学）；WeBank（微众银行）；Pazhou Laboratory（琶洲实验室）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）
HPCR: Holistic Proxy-based Contrastive Replay for Online Continual Learning
Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen（哈尔滨工业大学（深圳））；Centre for Frontier AI Research, Institute of High Performance Computing, A*STAR（新加坡高性能计算研究院前沿人工智能研究中心（新加坡科技研究局））
Enhancing Continual Learning for Software Vulnerability Prediction: Addressing Catastrophic Forgetting via Hybrid-Confidence-Aware Selective Replay for Temporal LLM Fine-Tuning
School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom（诺丁汉大学计算机科学学院）；School of Informatics and Computing, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, United States of America（北亚利桑那大学信息学院）；School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China（诺丁汉大学宁波校区）
Continual learning tries to learn new tasks without forgetting previously learned ones. In reality, most of the existing artificial neural network(ANN) models fail, while humans do the same by remembering previous works throughout their life. Although simply storing all past data can alleviate the problem, it needs large memory and often infeasible in real-world applications where last data access is limited. We hypothesize that the model that learns to solve each task continually has some task-specific properties and some task-invariant characteristics. We propose a hybrid continual learning …
NALBI Inc.（NALBI公司）；Seoul National University（首尔大学）
Continually learning in the real world must overcome many challenges, among which noisy labels are a common and inevitable issue. In this work, we present a repla-ybased continual learning framework that simultaneously addresses both catastrophic forgetting and noisy labels for the first time. Our solution is based on two observations; (i) forgetting can be mitigated even with noisy labels via self-supervised learning, and (ii) the purity of the replay buffer is crucial. Building on this regard, we propose two key components of our method: (i) a self-supervised replay technique named Self-Repl…
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；DeepMind（深度思维）
Continual learning is the problem of learning new tasks or knowledge while protecting old knowledge and ideally generalizing from old experience to learn new tasks faster. Neural networks trained by stochastic gradient descent often degrade on old tasks when trained successively on new tasks with different data distributions. This phenomenon, referred to as catastrophic forgetting, is considered a major hurdle to learning with non-stationary data or sequences of new tasks, and prevents networks from continually accumulating knowledge and skills. We examine this issue in the context of reinforc…
A remarkable capacity of the brain is its ability to autonomously reorganize memories during offline periods. Memory replay, a mechanism hypothesized to underlie biological offline learning, has inspired offline methods for reducing forgetting in artificial neural networks in continual learning settings. A memory-efficient and neurally-plausible method is generative replay, which achieves state of the art performance on continual learning benchmarks. However, unlike the brain, standard generative replay does not self-reorganize memories when trained offline on its own replay samples. We propos…
Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学计算机视觉中心）；Media Integration and Communication Center, University of Florence（佛罗伦萨大学媒体集成与传播中心）；Huawei Kirin Solution（华为麒麟解决方案）
Humans are capable of learning new tasks without forgetting previous ones, while neural networks fail due to catastrophic forgetting between new and previously-learned tasks. We consider a class-incremental setting which means that the task-ID is unknown at inference time. The imbalance between old and new classes typically results in a bias of the network towards the newest ones. This imbalance problem can either be addressed by storing exemplars from previous tasks, or by using image replay methods. However, the latter can only be applied to toy datasets since image generation for complex da…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；LG AI Research（LG人工智能研究院）
Online class-incremental continual learning (CL) studies the problem of learning new classes continually from an online non-stationary data stream, intending to adapt to new data while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. While memory replay has shown promising results, the recency bias in online learning caused by the commonly used Softmax classifier remains an unsolved challenge. Although the Nearest-Class-Mean (NCM) classifier is significantly undervalued in the CL community, we demonstrate that it is a simple yet effective substitute for the Softmax classifier. It addresses the recency bias…
Catastrophic forgetting in neural networks is a significant problem for continual learning. A majority of the current methods replay previous data during training, which violates the constraints of an ideal continual learning system. Additionally, current approaches that deal with forgetting ignore the problem of catastrophic remembering, i.e. the worsening ability to discriminate between data from different tasks. In our work, we introduce Relevance Mapping Networks (RMNs) which are inspired by the Optimal Overlap Hypothesis. The mappings reflects the relevance of the weights for the task at …
University of Central Florida（中佛罗里达大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；Nanjing University（南京大学）
In many scenarios, 1) data streams are generated in real time; 2) labeled data are expensive and only limited labels are available in the beginning; 3) real-world data is not always i.i.d. and data drift over time gradually; 4) the storage of historical streams is limited and model updating can only be achieved based on a very short lookback window. This learning setting limits the applicability and availability of many Machine Learning (ML) algorithms. We generalize the learning task under such setting as a semi-supervised drifted stream learning with short lookback problem (SDSL). SDSL impos…
The Australian Institute for Machine Learning（澳大利亚机器学习研究所）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）；The University of New South Wales（新南威尔士大学）
Continual Learning (CL) methods aim to enable machine learning models to learn new tasks without catastrophic forgetting of those that have been previously mastered. Existing CL approaches often keep a buffer of previously-seen samples, perform knowledge distillation, or use regularization techniques towards this goal. Despite their performance, they still suffer from interference across tasks which leads to catastrophic forgetting. To ameliorate this problem, we propose to only activate and select sparse neurons for learning current and past tasks at any stage. More parameters space and model…
School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University（北京大学电子工程与计算机科学学院）
The ability of intelligent agents to learn and remember multiple tasks sequentially is crucial to achieving artificial general intelligence. Many continual learning (CL) methods have been proposed to overcome catastrophic forgetting which results from non i.i.d data in the sequential learning of neural networks. In this paper we focus on class incremental learning, a challenging CL scenario. For this scenario, generative replay is a promising strategy which generates and replays pseudo data for previous tasks to alleviate catastrophic forgetting. However, it is hard to train a generative model…
Conventional replay-based approaches to continual learning (CL) require, for each learning phase with new data, the replay of samples representing all of the previously learned knowledge in order to avoid catastrophic forgetting. Since the amount of learned knowledge grows over time in CL problems, generative replay spends an increasing amount of time just re-learning what is already known. In this proof-of-concept study, we propose a replay-based CL strategy that we term adiabatic replay (AR), which derives its efficiency from the (reasonable) assumption that each new learning phase is adiaba…
IDER: IDempotent Experience Replay for Reliable Continual Learning
School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学计算机科学学院）；Shanghai Innovation Institute（上海创新研究院）；Lehigh University（莱斯大学）；State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, BIGAI（通用人工智能国家重点实验室，BIGAI）；MIFA Lab（MIFA实验室）
Memory replay may be key to learning in biological brains, which manage to learn new tasks continually without catastrophically interfering with previous knowledge. On the other hand, artificial neural networks suffer from catastrophic forgetting and tend to only perform well on tasks that they were recently trained on. In this work we explore the application of latent space based memory replay for classification using artificial neural networks. We are able to preserve good performance in previous tasks by storing only a small percentage of the original data in a compressed latent space versi…
