When Forgetting is not Catastrophic: On the Mechanics of Spurious Forgetting
Knowledge that a language model appears to forget during finetuning often remains stored and can be recovered, a phenomenon called spurious forgetting. Finetuning on new facts can even produce forgetting that undoes itself: recall of the old facts collapses, recovers as training continues on new facts alone, and only then erodes for good. We seek to understand when such forgetting is not catastrophic. A minimal associative memory reproduces these dynamics with three ingredients: keys with shared structure, concentrated new values, and normalization in the network. Finetuning moves all old representations along a common direction, hiding the old facts while preserving their relative geomet...
| Authors | Vedant Palit, Florent Draye, Nicolas Zucchet et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 6 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 6 October 2026 |
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