Gong Yifan
2025
RECALL: REpresentation-aligned Catastrophic-forgetting ALLeviation via Hierarchical Model Merging
Bowen Wang
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Haiyuan Wan
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Liwen Shi
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Chen Yang
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Peng He
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Yue Ma
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Haochen Han
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Wenhao Li
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Tiao Tan
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Yongjian Li
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Fangming Liu
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Gong Yifan
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Sheng Zhang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
We unveil that internal representations in large language models (LLMs) serve as reliable proxies of learned knowledge, and propose **RECALL**, a novel representation-aware model merging framework for continual learning without access to historical data. RECALL computes inter-model similarity from layer-wise hidden representations over clustered typical samples, and performs adaptive, hierarchical parameter fusion to align knowledge across models. This design enables the preservation of domain-general features in shallow layers while allowing task-specific adaptation in deeper layers. Unlike prior methods that require task labels or incur performance trade-offs, RECALL achieves seamless multi-domain integration and strong resistance to catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments across five NLP tasks and multiple continual learning scenarios show that RECALL outperforms baselines in both knowledge retention and generalization, providing a scalable and data-free solution for evolving LLMs.
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- Haochen Han 1
- Peng He 1
- Wenhao Li (李文浩) 1
- Yongjian Li 1
- Fangming Liu 1
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