Countering Catastrophic Forgetting of Large Language Models for Better Instruction Following via Weight-Space Model Merging
Large language models have been adopted in the medical domain for clinical documentation to reduce clinician burden. However, studies have reported that LLMs often "forget" a significant amount of instruction-following ability when fine-tuned using a task-specific medical dataset, a critical challenge in adopting general-purpose LLMs for clinical applications. This study presents a model merging framework to efficiently adapt general-purpose LLMs to the medical domain by countering this forgetting issue. By merging a clinical foundation model (GatorTronLlama) with a general instruct model (Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct) via interpolation-based merge methods, we seek to derive a domain-adapted mod...
| Authors | Mengxian Lyu, Cheng Peng, Ziyi Chen et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 2 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 April 2026 |
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