Towards Automatic Continual Learning: A Self-Adaptive Framework for Continual Instruction Tuning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lin, Peiyi, Zhang, Fukai, Niu, Kai, Fu, Hao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lin, Peiyi
Zhang, Fukai
Niu, Kai
Fu, Hao
author_facet Lin, Peiyi
Zhang, Fukai
Niu, Kai
Fu, Hao
contents Continual instruction tuning enables large language models (LLMs) to learn incrementally while retaining past knowledge, whereas existing methods primarily focus on how to retain old knowledge rather than on selecting which new knowledge to learn. In domain-specific contexts, maintaining data quality and managing system constraints remain key challenges. To address these issues, we propose an automated continual instruction tuning framework that dynamically filters incoming data, which identify and reduce redundant data across successive updates. Our approach utilizes a small proxy model for efficient perplexity-based filtering, and updates the proxy to ensure that the filtering criteria remain aligned with the evolving state of the deployed model. Compared to existing static data selection methods, our framework can effectively handle incrementally acquired data and shifting distributions. Additionally, it addresses practical deployment challenges by enabling seamless model updates, supporting version rollback and incorporating automatic checkpoint evaluation. We evaluated the system in real-world medical scenarios. It reduced computational costs by 66.7% and improved model performance, and achieved autonomous updates, thus demonstrating its effectiveness for automatic continual instruction tuning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_15924
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Automatic Continual Learning: A Self-Adaptive Framework for Continual Instruction Tuning
Lin, Peiyi
Zhang, Fukai
Niu, Kai
Fu, Hao
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Continual instruction tuning enables large language models (LLMs) to learn incrementally while retaining past knowledge, whereas existing methods primarily focus on how to retain old knowledge rather than on selecting which new knowledge to learn. In domain-specific contexts, maintaining data quality and managing system constraints remain key challenges. To address these issues, we propose an automated continual instruction tuning framework that dynamically filters incoming data, which identify and reduce redundant data across successive updates. Our approach utilizes a small proxy model for efficient perplexity-based filtering, and updates the proxy to ensure that the filtering criteria remain aligned with the evolving state of the deployed model. Compared to existing static data selection methods, our framework can effectively handle incrementally acquired data and shifting distributions. Additionally, it addresses practical deployment challenges by enabling seamless model updates, supporting version rollback and incorporating automatic checkpoint evaluation. We evaluated the system in real-world medical scenarios. It reduced computational costs by 66.7% and improved model performance, and achieved autonomous updates, thus demonstrating its effectiveness for automatic continual instruction tuning.
title Towards Automatic Continual Learning: A Self-Adaptive Framework for Continual Instruction Tuning
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15924