When to Review: Spaced Repetition for Continual Pre-Training of Language Models

📅 2026-08-18
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
研究解决了持续预训练中知识遗忘问题,通过引入基于认知科学的间隔重复训练方法来调度样本复习,提高旧知识保留和新知识获取。
📝 Abstract
Continual pre-training of large language models must acquire new information without erasing old knowledge. Existing replay methods often choose a global old/new mixture and sample uniformly, ignoring that examples differ in how quickly they are forgotten. We formulate continual pre-training as adaptive review scheduling: the training loop should decide not only how much history to replay, but which examples should return at each step. We introduce Spaced Repetition Training (SRT), a continual learning framework inspired by cognitive science, which schedules sample-rehearsal using the SuperMemo-2 (SM-2) algorithm. SRT maintains per-example review state, maps per-example perplexity to a recall-quality signal, and schedules historical examples for retention and new examples for consolidation while leaving the model, objective, and optimizer unchanged. On temporally separated Wikipedia and code corpora, SRT improves the stability-plasticity trade-off, recovering 5 to 37 percentage points of old-knowledge accuracy lost by naive continual pre-training across model scales while preserving or improving new-knowledge acquisition. At larger scale, SRT preserves broad benchmark performance that naive continual pre-training and uniform replay substantially degrade. Experiments with vision and tabular data further suggest that the scheduling principle extends beyond language when paired with an appropriate recall signal.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

continual pre-training
large language models
forgetting
replay methods
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Spaced Repetition Training
SuperMemo-2 Algorithm
Adaptive Review Scheduling
A
Alankar Atreya
NatWest AI Research
D
Devesh Batra
NatWest AI Research
Y
Yoages Kumar Mantri
NatWest AI Research
G
Geremy Bantug
NatWest AI Research
G
Greig A Cowan
NatWest AI Research
R
Raad Khraishi
NatWest AI Research, University College London