2026· Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics· pp. 18472-18487· 0 citations· 48 references
Computer Science
TL;DR
This work proposes At-tribution Scores-based Soft Orthogonality Low-Rank Adaptation (ASO-LoRA), an effective and efficient framework that simultaneously facilitates knowledge transfer while mitigating catastrophic forgetting and achieving a balance between knowledge transfer and preservation.
Abstract
When large language models are used in real-world scenarios, continual learning (CL) becomes a non-trivial problem. In particular, continual learning with modern LLMs is challenged both by the substantial computational costs induced by their massive parameter scale, and by the limitations of current CL meth-ods, which are mainly designed to mitigate catastrophic forgetting while neglecting knowledge sharing across tasks. We further observe that models with stronger performance exhibit stronger inter-task connections. In light of the above challenges and findings, we propose At-tribution Scores-based Soft Orthogonality Low-Rank Adaptation (ASO-LoRA), an effective and efficient framework that simultaneously facilitates knowledge transfer while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Specifically, ASO-LoRA initially assigns task-specific parameter subspaces for new tasks utilizing multi-LoRA modules, enabling for efficient training and inference without relying on task labels. Then, ASO-LoRA leverages attribution scores to evaluate task similarity and employs soft orthogonality between task-specific subspaces, guiding gradient updates in directions that promote parameter isolation, achieving a balance between knowledge transfer and preservation. Experiments are carried out on both the T5-large and the LLaMA2-7B, showing ASO-LoRA’s superior performance and suitability as a plug-in CL solution for general Transformer-based LLMs. Code is available at https://github. com/736619821/ASO-LORA .
Experiments show that FiUni can effectively infer latent batch-level task affiliations and achieve competitive performance against advanced task-aware CL methods with fewer trainable parameters.
Dezheng Han, Anlan Zhang, Zhiwu Zhu et al.· 0 citations
This work observes that pooled token embeddings from a frozen LLM embedding layer already separate task distributions throughout the learning sequence, and concludes that a Gaussian mixture model fitted on these embeddings, without any gradient-based training, is sufficient for task-agnostic adapter selection at test time, eliminating the need for a learned gating module.
GLA-LoRA establishes a unified learning strategy that synergistically integrates multi-granular contrastive learning with knowledge distillation and establishes that explicit global-local knowledge alignment is essential for achieving high-fidelity, parameter-efficient fine-tuning across diverse language tasks.
Unified Gradient Projection is proposed, which constrains parameter updates using reference gradients from language-balanced replay in a unified projection space and shows that combining gradient-level projection with data-level replay yields complementary gains in stability and plasticity.
Ziang Ren, Guodong Lin, Yuchen Ai et al.· 0 citations
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit strong generalization and reasoning abilities due to large-scale multimodal pre-training. However, fine-tuning these models on downstream tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where newly learned task-specific knowledge degrades previously acquired capabilities. This issue arises because gradient updates for new tasks overwrite parameters critical to prior knowledge, limiting the practical deployment of MLLMs. To address this challenge, we propose Activation-Weighted Adaptive REtention (AWARe), a fine-tuning method that mitigates catastrophic forgetting by dynamically controlling parameter updates based on activation patterns. AWARe assigns activation-based importance scores to parameters, selectively freezing those essential for preserving prior capabilities while allowing less important parameters to adapt to new tasks. Importantly, AWARe operates without modifying model architectures, ensuring compatibility with existing inference engines. Extensive experiments demonstrate that AWARe effectively preserves upstream capabilities while achieving superior downstream performance compared to existing methods. Code is available at https://github.com/kaln27/AWARe.
Jun-Yong Liao, Jinfan Lv, Guoming Wang et al.· 0 citations
Continual Learning for Named Entity Recognition (CLNER) enable models to incrementally learn new entity types without forgetting previously acquired ones. However, existing methods suffer from catastrophic forgetting and insufficient exploitation of shared information across tasks. This paper proposes FSE, a Fast-Slow Experts enhanced span-based NER model for CLNER. The shared fast expert learns token-level links to efficiently filter out unlikely spans, while the task-specific slow expert performs span classification only on the remaining candidates. It stabilizes learning by promoting knowledge sharing across tasks and maintains plasticity by reducing learning burden at each task. A length-decay negative sampling strategy to mitigate span imbalance is also introduced. Extensive experiments on OntoNotes and FewNERD synthestic datasets demonstrate that FSE achieves state-of-the-art performance in CLNER scenarios, with effectiveness of each component, empirical evidence of faster convergence and expected functionality of both experts.
Yunan Zhang, Yang Fan, Heng Li et al.· Pattern Recognition Letters· 0 citations