Recently, foundation language models (LMs) have marked significant achievements in the domains of natural language processing and computer vision. Unlike traditional neural network models, foundation LMs obtain a great ability for transfer learning by acquiring rich common sense knowledge through pre-training on extensive unsupervised datasets with a vast number of parameters. Despite these capabilities, LMs still struggle with catastrophic forgetting, hindering their ability to learn continuously like humans. To address this, continual learning (CL) methodologies have been introduced, allowing LMs to adapt to new tasks while retaining learned knowledge. However, a systematic taxonomy of existing approaches and a comparison of their performance are still lacking. In this article, we delve into a comprehensive review, summarization, and classification of the existing literature on CL-based approaches applied to foundation language models, such as pre-trained language models, large language models, and vision-language models. We divide these studies into offline and online CL, which consist of traditional methods, parameter-efficient-based methods, instruction tuning-based methods and continual pre-training methods. Additionally, we outline the typical datasets and metrics employed in CL research and provide a detailed analysis of the challenges and future work for LMs-based continual learning.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown great success in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, whist they still need updates after deployment to fix errors or keep pace with the changing knowledge in the world. Researchers formulate such problem as Model Editing and have developed various editors focusing on different axes of editing properties. However, current editors can hardly support all properties and rely on heavy computational resources. In this paper, we propose a plug-in Model Editing method based on neuron-indexed dynamic LoRA (MELO), which alters the behavior of language models by dynamically activating certain LoRA blocks according to the index built in an inner vector database. Our method satisfies various editing properties with high efficiency and can be easily integrated into multiple LLM backbones. Experimental results show that our proposed MELO achieves state-of-the-art editing performance on three sequential editing tasks (document classification, question answering and hallucination correction), while requires the least trainable parameters and computational cost.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) aims to generate more reliable and accurate responses, by augmenting large language models(LLMs) with the external vast and dynamic knowledge. Most previous work focuses on using RAG for single-round question answering, while how to adapt RAG to the complex conversational setting wherein the question is interdependent on the preceding context is not well studied. In this paper, we propose a conversation-level RAG (ConvRAG) approach, which incorporates fine-grained retrieval augmentation and self-check for conversational question answering (CQA). In particular, our approach consists of three components, namely conversational question refiner, fine-grained retriever and self-check based response generator, which work collaboratively for question understanding and relevant information acquisition in conversational settings. Extensive experiments demonstrate the great advantages of our approach over the state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, we also release a Chinese CQA dataset with new features including reformulated question, extracted keyword, retrieved paragraphs and their helpfulness, which facilitates further researches in RAG enhanced CQA.

The recurrent neural networks (RNNs) have shown good performance for sentence similarity modeling in recent years. Most RNNs focus on modeling the hidden states based on the current sentence, while the context information from the other sentence is not well investigated during the hidden state generation. In this paper, we propose a context-aligned RNN (CA-RNN) model, which incorporates the contextual information of the aligned words in a sentence pair for the inner hidden state generation. Specifically, we first perform word alignment detection to identify the aligned words in the two sentences. Then, we present a context alignment gating mechanism and embed it into our model to automatically absorb the aligned words' context for the hidden state update. Experiments on three benchmark datasets, namely TREC-QA and WikiQA for answer selection and MSRP for paraphrase identification, show the great advantages of our proposed model. In particular, we achieve the new state-of-the-art performance on TREC-QA and WikiQA. Furthermore, our model is comparable to if not better than the recent neural network based approaches on MSRP.