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arXiv 提交日期: 2026-03-12
📄 Abstract - A Quantitative Characterization of Forgetting in Post-Training

Continual post-training of generative models is widely used, yet a principled understanding of when and why forgetting occurs remains limited. We develop theoretical results under a two-mode mixture abstraction (representing old and new tasks), proposed by Chen et al. (2025) (arXiv:2510.18874), and formalize forgetting in two forms: (i) mass forgetting, where the old mixture weight collapses to zero, and (ii) old-component drift, where an already-correct old component shifts during training. For equal-covariance Gaussian modes, we prove that forward-KL objectives trained on data from the new distribution drive the old weight to zero, while reverse-KL objectives converge to the true target (thereby avoiding mass forgetting) and perturb the old mean only through overlap-gated misassignment probabilities controlled by the Bhattacharyya coefficient, yielding drift that decays exponentially with mode separation and a locally well-conditioned geometry with exponential convergence. We further quantify how replay interacts with these objectives. For forward-KL, replay must modify the training distribution to change the population optimum; for reverse-KL, replay leaves the population objective unchanged but prevents finite-batch old-mode starvation through bounded importance weighting. Finally, we analyze three recently proposed near-on-policy post-training methods, SDFT (arXiv:2601.19897), TTT-Discover (arXiv:2601.16175), and OAPL (arXiv:2602.19362), via the same lens and derive explicit conditions under which each retains old mass and exhibits overlap-controlled drift. Overall, our results show that forgetting can by precisely quantified based on the interaction between divergence direction, geometric behavioral overlap, sampling regime, and the visibility of past behavior during training.

顶级标签: theory model training machine learning
详细标签: continual learning catastrophic forgetting mixture models kl divergence post-training 或 搜索:

训练后遗忘的定量表征 / A Quantitative Characterization of Forgetting in Post-Training


1️⃣ 一句话总结

这篇论文通过理论分析,揭示了生成模型在持续训练后发生遗忘的根本原因,并精确量化了遗忘的程度,指出遗忘主要取决于训练目标函数的选择、新旧任务数据的重叠程度以及训练时的数据采样方式。

源自 arXiv: 2603.12163