MoFO: Momentum-Filtered Optimizer for Mitigating Forgetting in LLM Fine-Tuning

ICLR 2025 Conference Submission12763 Authors

Keywords: LLM fine-tuning, catastrophic forgetting

Abstract:

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across a wide range of tasks. Typically, an LLM is first pre-trained on large corpora and subsequently fine-tuned on task-specific datasets. However, during fine-tuning, LLMs may forget some knowledge acquired in the pre-training stage, leading to a decline in general capabilities. To address this challenge, we propose a new fine-tuning algorithm termed Momentum-Filtered Optimizer (MoFO).
As an extension of greedy block coordinate descent (BCD) methods, MoFO iteratively selects and updates the model parameters with the largest momentum magnitudes.
MoFO achieves similar fine-tuning performance to the default fine-tuning algorithm while effectively mitigating knowledge forgetting.
Furthermore, MoFO does not require access to pre-training data, making it highly suitable for scenarios where the pre-training data is unavailable, such as fine-tuning checkpoint-only open-source LLMs.
We validate MoFO through rigorous convergence analysis and extensive experiments, demonstrating its superiority over existing methods in mitigating forgetting.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

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Submission Number: 12763