Learning, Fast and Slow: Towards LLMs That Adapt Continually

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are trained for downstream tasks by updating their parameters (e.g., via RL). However, updating model parameters forces them to absorb task-specific information, which can result in catastrophic forgetting and loss of plasticity. In contrast, in-context learning with fixed LLM parameters can cheaply and rapidly adapt to task-specific requirements (e.g., prompt optimization), but cannot by itself typically match the performance gains available through updating LLM parameters. Inspired by how human learning works at multiple time scales (e.g., System 1 vs 2), we propose a fast-slow learning framework for LLMs, instantiated with model parameters as "slow" weights and optimized context as "fast" weights. These fast "weights" can learn from textual feedback to absorb the task-specific information, while allowing slow weights to stay closer to the base model and persist general reasoning behaviors. Fast-Slow Training (FST) is up to 3x more sample-efficient than only slow learning (RL) across reasoning tasks, while consistently reaching a higher performance asymptote. Moreover, FST-trained models remain closer to the base LLM (up to 70% less KL divergence), resulting in less catastrophic forgetting than RL-training. This reduced drift also preserves plasticity: after training on one task, FST trained models adapt more effectively to a subsequent task. In continual learning scenarios, where task domains change on the fly, FST continues to acquire each new task while RL stalls.