Beyond Static Models: An Evolving Framework for Continual Learning in Large Language Models across Training Stages

Large language models (LLMs) often suffer from catastrophic forgetting in continual learning: after learning new tasks sequentially, they perform worse on earlier tasks. Existing methods mitigate catastrophic forgetting by data replay, parameter freezing, or regularization. However, these methods lack understanding of LLM mechanisms and cannot distinguish which parameters store important knowledge from previous tasks and which parameters can be updated for new tasks. To address this, we propose the attribution-guided continual fine-tuning framework that leverages Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) to estimate parameter importance based on the internal computational process of LLMs. During continual learning, parameters critical to previous tasks are constrained to receive smaller updates, while less relevant parameters remain available for learning new tasks. Extensive experiments show that, compared with baseline methods, our approach reduces catastrophic forgetting while preserving adaptability to new tasks, highlighting the value of mechanistic attribution for continual fine-tuning of LLMs.

To mitigate catastrophic forgetting in downstream continual learning (CL) for large language models (LLMs), existing methods typically constrain parameter updates or introduce task-specific adaptation modules. However, these methods often rely on explicit task boundaries during training, limiting their applicability to realistic task-free scenarios. In this paper, we propose a Fisher-guided unified (FiUni) framework for batch-level task detection and parameter-efficient continual adaptation. FiUni is motivated by a key observation about the Fisher information matrix (FIM) of pre-trained models: the orthogonality among the principal subspaces of its Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature (K-FAC) approximation, estimated from a small number of downstream task samples, can reflect the similarity between different tasks. Based on this observation, FiUni constructs FIM-derived frozen subspaces to guide low-rank adaptation (LoRA), while matching the Fisher principal subspace of each incoming batch window with historical subspaces. This enables FiUni to adaptively determine whether to reuse existing knowledge, expand a related subspace, or create a new subspace, dynamically balancing knowledge sharing and task isolation. Experiments show that FiUni can effectively infer latent batch-level task affiliations and achieve competitive performance against advanced task-aware CL methods with fewer trainable parameters.

As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, the next question is how can we enable models to continually learn? Today, the field largely frames this as a problem of context management and mitigating forgetting. We argue this framing is incomplete: continual learning is fundamentally about increasing model competence as the world changes. We disentangle this change along two axes -- space, where the model encounters new domains, and time, where the underlying data drifts under a fixed task. This framing lets us study continual learning under realistic conditions: new domains arrive over time, facts drift past their training cutoff, and agentic interactions accumulate state across episodes. To evaluate methods under this setting, we recast widely used LLM benchmarks as sequential problems and introduce a single mechanism-agnostic protocol that compares prompt-based methods (GEPA, ACE), supervised learning (SFT, SDFT), reinforcement learning (GRPO, SDPO), and context compression (Cartridges, In-place TTT). Prompt-based methods fit each new stage quickly but degrade on future tasks. Distillation-based methods accumulate knowledge stably but struggle to update outdated facts. Context compression improves efficiency without substantially improving the ability to learn new tasks. Online reinforcement learning adapts most effectively to knowledge updates but remains sensitive to noisy reward signals. Overall, our results suggest that continual learning is not a single capability: different patterns of environmental change require fundamentally different update behaviors, determining when adaptation must be learned inside model weights and when it can be achieved through external scaffolding. We hope that understanding where each method succeeds and fails will guide the design of stronger continual learning systems.