historical knowledge
Class-aware Domain Knowledge Fusion and Fission for Continual Test-Time Adaptation
Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTTA) aims to quickly fine-tune the model during the test phase so that it can adapt to multiple unknown downstream domain distributions without pre-acquiring downstream domain data. To this end, existing advanced CTTA methods mainly reduce the catastrophic forgetting of historical knowledge caused by irregular switching of downstream domain data by restoring the initial model or reusing historical models. However, these methods are usually accompanied by serious insufficient learning of new knowledge and interference from potentially harmful historical knowledge, resulting in severe performance degradation. To this end, we propose a class-aware domain Knowledge Fusion and Fission method for continual test-time adaptation, called KFF, which adaptively expands and merges class-aware domain knowledge in old and new domains according to the test-time data from different domains, where discriminative historical knowledge can be dynamically accumulated. Specifically, considering the huge domain gap within streaming data, a domain Knowledge FIssion (KFI) module is designed to adaptively separate new domain knowledge from a paired class-aware domain prompt pool, alleviating the impact of negative knowledge brought by old domains that are distinct from the current domain. Besides, to avoid the cumulative computation and storage overheads from continuously fissioning new knowledge, a domain Knowledge FUsion (KFU) module is further designed to merge the fissioned new knowledge into the existing knowledge pool with minimal cost, where a greedy knowledge dynamic merging strategy is designed to improve the compatibility of new and old knowledge while keeping the computational efficiency.
Continual Knowledge Adaptation for Reinforcement Learning
Reinforcement Learning enables agents to learn optimal behaviors through interactions with environments. However, real-world environments are typically non-stationary, requiring agents to continuously adapt to new tasks and changing conditions. Although Continual Reinforcement Learning facilitates learning across multiple tasks, existing methods often suffer from catastrophic forgetting and inefficient knowledge utilization. To address these challenges, we propose Continual Knowledge Adaptation for Reinforcement Learning (CKA-RL), which enables the accumulation and effective utilization of historical knowledge. Specifically, we introduce a Continual Knowledge Adaptation strategy, which involves maintaining a task-specific knowledge vector pool and dynamically using historical knowledge to adapt the agent to new tasks. This process mitigates catastrophic forgetting and enables efficient knowledge transfer across tasks by preserving and adapting critical model parameters. Additionally, we propose an Adaptive Knowledge Merging mechanism that combines similar knowledge vectors to address scalability challenges, reducing memory requirements while ensuring the retention of essential knowledge. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed CKA-RL outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an improvement of 4.20% in overall performance and 8.02% in forward transfer.
Large Language Models' Expert-level Global History Knowledge Benchmark (HiST-LLM)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to transform humanities and social science research, yet their history knowledge and comprehension at a graduate level remains untested. Benchmarking LLMs in history is particularly challenging, given that human knowledge of history is inherently unbalanced, with more information available on Western history and recent periods. We introduce the History Seshat Test for LLMs (HiST-LLM), based on a subset of the Seshat Global History Databank, which provides a structured representation of human historical knowledge, containing 36,000 data points across 600 historical societies and over 2,700 scholarly references. This dataset covers every major world region from the Neolithic period to the Industrial Revolution and includes information reviewed and assembled by history experts and graduate research assistants.
AIMMerging: Adaptive Iterative Model Merging Using Training Trajectories for Language Model Continual Learning
Feng, Yujie, Li, Jian, Dong, Xiaoyu, Xu, Pengfei, Zhou, Xiaohui, Zhang, Yujia, LU, Zexin, Wang, Yasha, Zhao, Alan, Chu, Xu, Wu, Xiao-Ming
Continual learning (CL) is essential for deploying large language models (LLMs) in dynamic real-world environments without the need for costly retraining. Recent model merging-based methods have attracted significant attention, but they still struggle to effectively manage the trade-off between learning new knowledge and preventing forgetting, a challenge largely stemming from suboptimal number of merges and merging frequency. In this paper, we introduce Adaptive Iterative Model Merging (AimMerging), a novel CL framework that utilizes learning and forgetting signals from the training trajectory to dynamically monitor the model's training status. Guided by dynamic monitoring, the training trajectory-guided merge controller adaptively determines the timing and frequency of iterative fusion, while the rehearsal-based knowledge fusion module computes the merging weights and executes the fusion. Comprehensive experiments on three CL benchmarks with various model sizes (from 770M to 13B) demonstrate that AimMerging achieves significant performance improvements over existing state-of-the-art methods, with an average relative improvement of 80% and 59% on FWT and BWT, respectively. The source code is provided for reproducibility.
FedDAA: Dynamic Client Clustering for Concept Drift Adaptation in Federated Learning
In federated learning (FL), the data distribution of each client may change over time, introducing both temporal and spatial data heterogeneity, known as concept drift. Data heterogeneity arises from three drift sources: real drift (a shift in the conditional distribution P(y|x)), virtual drift (a shift in the input distribution P(x)), and label drift (a shift in the label distribution P(y)). However, most existing FL methods addressing concept drift primarily focus on real drift. When clients experience virtual or label drift, these methods often fail to selectively retain useful historical knowledge, leading to catastrophic forgetting. A key challenge lies in distinguishing different sources of drift, as they require distinct adaptation strategies: real drift calls for discarding outdated data, while virtual or label drift benefits from retaining historical data. Without explicitly identifying the drift sources, a general adaptation strategy is suboptimal and may harm generalization. To address this challenge, we propose FedDAA, a dynamic clustered FL framework designed to adapt to multi-source concept drift while preserving valuable historical knowledge. Specifically, FedDAA integrates three modules: a cluster number determination module to find the optimal number of clusters; a real drift detection module to distinguish real drift from virtual/label drift; and a concept drift adaptation module to adapt to new data while retaining useful historical information. We provide theoretical convergence guarantees, and experiments show that FedDAA achieves 7.84% to 8.52% accuracy improvements over state-of-the-art methods on Fashion-MNIST, CIFAR-10, and CIFAR-100.
Large Language Models' Expert-level Global History Knowledge Benchmark (HiST-LLM)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to transform humanities and social science research, yet their history knowledge and comprehension at a graduate level remains untested. Benchmarking LLMs in history is particularly challenging, given that human knowledge of history is inherently unbalanced, with more information available on Western history and recent periods. We introduce the History Seshat Test for LLMs (HiST-LLM), based on a subset of the Seshat Global History Databank, which provides a structured representation of human historical knowledge, containing 36,000 data points across 600 historical societies and over 2,700 scholarly references. This dataset covers every major world region from the Neolithic period to the Industrial Revolution and includes information reviewed and assembled by history experts and graduate research assistants. We find that, in a four-choice format, LLMs have a balanced accuracy ranging from 33.6% (Llama-3.1-8B)
InterCLIP-MEP: Interactive CLIP and Memory-Enhanced Predictor for Multi-modal Sarcasm Detection
The prevalence of sarcasm in social media, conveyed through text-image combinations, presents significant challenges for sentiment analysis and intention mining. Current multi-modal sarcasm detection methods have been proven to struggle with biases from spurious cues, leading to a superficial understanding of the complex interactions between text and image. To address these issues, we propose InterCLIP-MEP, a robust framework for multi-modal sarcasm detection. InterCLIP-MEP introduces a refined variant of CLIP, Interactive CLIP (InterCLIP), as the backbone, enhancing sample representations by embedding cross-modality information in each encoder. Furthermore, a novel training strategy is designed to adapt InterCLIP for a Memory-Enhanced Predictor (MEP). MEP uses dynamic dual-channel memory to store valuable historical knowledge of test samples and then leverages this memory as a non-parametric classifier to derive the final prediction. By using InterCLIP to encode text-image interactions more effectively and incorporating MEP, InterCLIP-MEP offers a more robust recognition of multi-modal sarcasm. Experiments demonstrate that InterCLIP-MEP achieves state-of-the-art performance on the MMSD2.0 benchmark. Code and data are available at https://github.com/CoderChen01/InterCLIP-MEP.
Multi-hop Question Answering under Temporal Knowledge Editing
Cheng, Keyuan, Lin, Gang, Fei, Haoyang, zhai, Yuxuan, Yu, Lu, Ali, Muhammad Asif, Hu, Lijie, Wang, Di
Multi-hop question answering (MQA) under knowledge editing (KE) has garnered significant attention in the era of large language models. However, existing models for MQA under KE exhibit poor performance when dealing with questions containing explicit temporal contexts. To address this limitation, we propose a novel framework, namely TEMPoral knowLEdge augmented Multi-hop Question Answering (TEMPLE-MQA). Unlike previous methods, TEMPLE-MQA first constructs a time-aware graph (TAG) to store edit knowledge in a structured manner. Then, through our proposed inference path, structural retrieval, and joint reasoning stages, TEMPLE-MQA effectively discerns temporal contexts within the question query. Experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that TEMPLE-MQA significantly outperforms baseline models. Additionally, we contribute a new dataset, namely TKEMQA, which serves as the inaugural benchmark tailored specifically for MQA with temporal scopes.