Neural Networks Remember More: The Power of Parameter Isolation and Combination

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Zeng, Biqing, Li, Zehan, Ayesh, Aladdin
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866913692367454208
author Zeng, Biqing
Li, Zehan
Ayesh, Aladdin
author_facet Zeng, Biqing
Li, Zehan
Ayesh, Aladdin
contents Catastrophic forgetting is a pervasive issue for pre-trained language models (PLMs) during continual learning, where models lose previously acquired knowledge when sequentially trained on a series of tasks. The model's ability to retain old tasks is referred to as stability, while its adaptability to new tasks is called plasticity. Therefore, the key to solving this problem is to find a trade-off between the plasticity and stability of the model. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel method to achieve a balance between model stability and plasticity, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting. More specifically, our proposed approach leverages parameter isolation and a subsequent combination strategy. Initially, in the training stage, the model adapts to each downstream task via a parameter isolation method to prevent potential interference among different tasks. We then combine all trained parameters, which contain acquired knowledge, using the task arithmetic method and finally apply them to the backbone model. Empirical evaluations on continual language learning benchmarks substantiate the effectiveness of our approach, revealing a marked enhancement over existing state-of-the-art approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_10966
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neural Networks Remember More: The Power of Parameter Isolation and Combination
Zeng, Biqing
Li, Zehan
Ayesh, Aladdin
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Catastrophic forgetting is a pervasive issue for pre-trained language models (PLMs) during continual learning, where models lose previously acquired knowledge when sequentially trained on a series of tasks. The model's ability to retain old tasks is referred to as stability, while its adaptability to new tasks is called plasticity. Therefore, the key to solving this problem is to find a trade-off between the plasticity and stability of the model. To address this issue, in this paper, we propose a novel method to achieve a balance between model stability and plasticity, thereby mitigating catastrophic forgetting. More specifically, our proposed approach leverages parameter isolation and a subsequent combination strategy. Initially, in the training stage, the model adapts to each downstream task via a parameter isolation method to prevent potential interference among different tasks. We then combine all trained parameters, which contain acquired knowledge, using the task arithmetic method and finally apply them to the backbone model. Empirical evaluations on continual language learning benchmarks substantiate the effectiveness of our approach, revealing a marked enhancement over existing state-of-the-art approaches.
title Neural Networks Remember More: The Power of Parameter Isolation and Combination
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.10966