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Event · barrier

Learning from experience

Catastrophic forgetting

The core obstacle: new knowledge erases old, and the model breaks where it worked yesterday.

During sequential training, gradients from a new task can overwrite parameters that matter for earlier tasks. Methods such as EWC protect some of those parameters, but there is still no general solution for large language models learning from an open-ended stream of experience.

Sources
PNAS · EWCOpen primary source