Conditions for Catastrophic Forgetting in Multilingual Translation
Fuente:
arXiv
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| Autores principales: | , |
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| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2025
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | |
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| _version_ | 1866908606177214464 |
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| author | Liu, Danni Niehues, Jan |
| author_facet | Liu, Danni Niehues, Jan |
| contents | Fine-tuning multilingual foundation models on specific languages often induces catastrophic forgetting, degrading performance on languages unseen in fine-tuning. While this phenomenon is widely-documented, the literature presents fragmented results about when forgetting occurs. To address this ambiguity, we conduct a systematic empirical study using machine translation as a testbed to identify the conditions that trigger catastrophic forgetting in multilingual fine-tuning. Through controlled experiments across different model architectures, data scales, and fine-tuning approaches, we reveal that the relative scale between model and data size is a primary determinant of forgetting. Moreover, we demonstrate that a model's instruction-following ability is more critical for retaining multilingual knowledge than its architecture. Contrary to assumptions, parameter-efficient fine-tuning offers no clear advantage over full fine-tuning in mitigating forgetting. Lastly, we show that cross-lingual alignment can mitigate forgetting while also facilitating positive transfer to unseen target languages. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_19546 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Conditions for Catastrophic Forgetting in Multilingual Translation Liu, Danni Niehues, Jan Computation and Language Fine-tuning multilingual foundation models on specific languages often induces catastrophic forgetting, degrading performance on languages unseen in fine-tuning. While this phenomenon is widely-documented, the literature presents fragmented results about when forgetting occurs. To address this ambiguity, we conduct a systematic empirical study using machine translation as a testbed to identify the conditions that trigger catastrophic forgetting in multilingual fine-tuning. Through controlled experiments across different model architectures, data scales, and fine-tuning approaches, we reveal that the relative scale between model and data size is a primary determinant of forgetting. Moreover, we demonstrate that a model's instruction-following ability is more critical for retaining multilingual knowledge than its architecture. Contrary to assumptions, parameter-efficient fine-tuning offers no clear advantage over full fine-tuning in mitigating forgetting. Lastly, we show that cross-lingual alignment can mitigate forgetting while also facilitating positive transfer to unseen target languages. |
| title | Conditions for Catastrophic Forgetting in Multilingual Translation |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19546 |