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Hauptverfasser: Song, Shezheng, Xu, Hao, Ma, Jun, Li, Shasha, Peng, Long, Wan, Qian, Liu, Xiaodong, Yu, Jie
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.13669
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author Song, Shezheng
Xu, Hao
Ma, Jun
Li, Shasha
Peng, Long
Wan, Qian
Liu, Xiaodong
Yu, Jie
author_facet Song, Shezheng
Xu, Hao
Ma, Jun
Li, Shasha
Peng, Long
Wan, Qian
Liu, Xiaodong
Yu, Jie
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong general language capabilities. However, fine-tuning these models on domain-specific tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where the model overwrites or loses essential knowledge acquired during pretraining. This phenomenon significantly limits the broader applicability of LLMs. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach to compute the element-wise importance of model parameters crucial for preserving general knowledge during fine-tuning. Our method utilizes a dual-objective optimization strategy: (1) regularization loss based on element-wise parameter importance, which constrains the updates to parameters crucial for general knowledge; (2) cross-entropy loss to adapt to domain-specific tasks. Additionally, we introduce layer-wise coefficients to account for the varying contributions of different layers, dynamically balancing the dual-objective optimization. Extensive experiments on scientific, medical, and physical tasks using GPT-J and LLaMA-3 demonstrate that our approach mitigates catastrophic forgetting while enhancing model adaptability. Compared to previous methods, our solution is approximately 20 times faster and requires only 10-15% of the storage, highlighting the practical efficiency. The code will be released.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_13669
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How to Alleviate Catastrophic Forgetting in LLMs Finetuning? Hierarchical Layer-Wise and Element-Wise Regularization
Song, Shezheng
Xu, Hao
Ma, Jun
Li, Shasha
Peng, Long
Wan, Qian
Liu, Xiaodong
Yu, Jie
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong general language capabilities. However, fine-tuning these models on domain-specific tasks often leads to catastrophic forgetting, where the model overwrites or loses essential knowledge acquired during pretraining. This phenomenon significantly limits the broader applicability of LLMs. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach to compute the element-wise importance of model parameters crucial for preserving general knowledge during fine-tuning. Our method utilizes a dual-objective optimization strategy: (1) regularization loss based on element-wise parameter importance, which constrains the updates to parameters crucial for general knowledge; (2) cross-entropy loss to adapt to domain-specific tasks. Additionally, we introduce layer-wise coefficients to account for the varying contributions of different layers, dynamically balancing the dual-objective optimization. Extensive experiments on scientific, medical, and physical tasks using GPT-J and LLaMA-3 demonstrate that our approach mitigates catastrophic forgetting while enhancing model adaptability. Compared to previous methods, our solution is approximately 20 times faster and requires only 10-15% of the storage, highlighting the practical efficiency. The code will be released.
title How to Alleviate Catastrophic Forgetting in LLMs Finetuning? Hierarchical Layer-Wise and Element-Wise Regularization
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.13669