COLA: Continual Learning via Autoencoder Retrieval of Adapters

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Mandivarapu, Jaya Krishna
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908611273293824
author Mandivarapu, Jaya Krishna
author_facet Mandivarapu, Jaya Krishna
contents Learning a set of tasks over time, also known as continual learning (CL), is one of the most challenging problems in artificial intelligence due to catastrophic forgetting. Large language models (LLMs) are often impractical to frequent re-training and continual learning , due to high cost of computational resources for training. Moreover, LLM are not suitable for continual learning as updating these models over time for acquiring new knowledge leads to overwrites existing knowledge leading to common phenomenon know as \textit{catastrophic forgetting}. In this paper, we aim to address these concerns using a novel framework , COLA that employs an autoencoder to learn capture low-dimensional embeddings of the weights associated with various tasks. Our approach facilitates the transfer of knowledge to new tasks while preventing catastrophic forgetting, all without using data replay or a substantial set of task-specific parameters. Our approach, COLA, makes the LLM efficiently learn new tasks with minimal training, insignificant performance degradation on previous tasks, and eliminates the need for retaining earlier training data. Empirical evaluation on different datasets ranging from task oriented dialouge system to intent classsfication datasets showcases that our method not only overcomes catastrophic forgetting but also achieves significant reduction in parameter usage and memory size, across multiple tasks and outperforming the existing state of the art methods across multiple datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_21836
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle COLA: Continual Learning via Autoencoder Retrieval of Adapters
Mandivarapu, Jaya Krishna
Machine Learning
Learning a set of tasks over time, also known as continual learning (CL), is one of the most challenging problems in artificial intelligence due to catastrophic forgetting. Large language models (LLMs) are often impractical to frequent re-training and continual learning , due to high cost of computational resources for training. Moreover, LLM are not suitable for continual learning as updating these models over time for acquiring new knowledge leads to overwrites existing knowledge leading to common phenomenon know as \textit{catastrophic forgetting}. In this paper, we aim to address these concerns using a novel framework , COLA that employs an autoencoder to learn capture low-dimensional embeddings of the weights associated with various tasks. Our approach facilitates the transfer of knowledge to new tasks while preventing catastrophic forgetting, all without using data replay or a substantial set of task-specific parameters. Our approach, COLA, makes the LLM efficiently learn new tasks with minimal training, insignificant performance degradation on previous tasks, and eliminates the need for retaining earlier training data. Empirical evaluation on different datasets ranging from task oriented dialouge system to intent classsfication datasets showcases that our method not only overcomes catastrophic forgetting but also achieves significant reduction in parameter usage and memory size, across multiple tasks and outperforming the existing state of the art methods across multiple datasets.
title COLA: Continual Learning via Autoencoder Retrieval of Adapters
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.21836