Continual Learning of Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey

arXiv:2404.16789v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The recent success of large language models (LLMs) trained on static, pre-collected, general datasets has sparked numerous research directions and applications. One such direction addresses the non-trivial challenge of integrating pre-trained LLMs into dynamic data distributions, task structures, and user preferences. Pre-trained LLMs, when tailored for specific needs, often experience significant performance degradation in previous knowledge domains -- a phenomenon known as "catastrophic forgetting". While extensively studied in the continual learning (CL) community, it presents …

arxiv continual cs.ai cs.cl cs.lg language language models large language large language models survey type