提出新方法精准发现任务专属参数,避免模型遗忘旧知识。
TRACE: Discovering Task-Specific Parameter via Adaptation-Aware Probing for Continual Fine-Tuning

- 通过短时预热微调识别任务关键参数,仅更新核心部分。
- 在多个基准上表现优于传统方法,遗忘率降低40%以上。
- 适合资源受限下持续微调大模型,支持跨模型迁移。
在实际部署中,大模型需持续适应新任务以保持生产环境的时效性,但盲目混合任务会削弱任务专属性,而顺序微调常因破坏性覆盖导致灾难性遗忘。基于重放缓存和独立适配器虽能缓解遗忘,却带来额外计算、存储与管理开销。鉴于大模型参数对单一任务存在冗余,本文将持续任务适应重构为通过适应感知探测发现任务专属参数:短时预热探测可暴露任务的适应轨迹,从而识别并隔离每个任务所需的少量核心参数,以缓解灾难性遗忘。在此基础上,提出TRACE方法,通过对比预训练模型与预热后模型,利用重要性评分(L₂范数与费雪信息)和特异性分析(参数更新的余弦相似度)确定核心参数。在持续微调中,仅更新当前任务的核心参数,其余冻结,有效保留已有知识。在多个标准基准上进行大量实验验证了该方法的优越性,并通过跨模型与规模迁移研究证明其泛化能力,实现‘小模型指导大模型’的资源受限微调范式。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
In real-world deployment, LLMs are often adapted continually across tasks to keep LLMs up-to-date in production, where new fine-tuning should preserve previously learned skills. However, indiscriminately mixing tasks can dilute task specialization, while sequential fine-tuning (full-parameter or low rank adaptation) often causes catastrophic forgetting due to destructive overwriting. Replay-based continual tuning and maintaining separate task-specific adapters can mitigate forgetting, but introduce additional compute, storage, and management overhead. Recognizing the redundancy of LLM parameters for any single task, we reframe continual task adaptation as task-specific parameter discovery via adaptation-aware probing: a short warm-start probe exposes a task's adaptation trace, enabling us to identify and isolate the small subset of parameters essential for each task to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. Building on this view, we introduce TRACE, a novel approach for discovering Task-specific paRameters via Adaptation-aware probing for Continual finE-tuning. We perform a short warm-start fine-tune to derive task-specific core parameters by comparing the warm-started and pre-trained models. Core parameters are identified via two strategies: importance scoring (L$_2$ norm and Fisher Information) and specificity analysis (cosine similarity of parameter updates). In continual fine-tuning settings, only the active task's core parameters are updated while others remain frozen, preserving prior knowledge. We conduct extensive experiments across multiple standard benchmarks to demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed method. Additionally, we validate the generalization of our method through a cross-model and scale transferability study, demonstrating a "small-to-large" paradigm that guides the fine-tuning of large-scale models under resource constraints.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。