RaPO reduces catastrophic forgetting in visual continual learning by shaping rewards around policy drift and stabilizing advantages with cross-task exponential moving averages during reinforcement fine-tuning of multimodal models.
Reinforcement fine-tuning naturally mitigates forgetting in continual post-training
8 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
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abstract
Continual post-training (CPT) is a popular and effective technique for adapting foundation models like multimodal large language models to ever-evolving downstream tasks. While existing research primarily focuses on methods like data replay, model expansion, or parameter regularization, the fundamental role of the learning paradigm remains largely unexplored. This paper presents a comparative analysis of two core post-training paradigms: supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT), investigating their respective impacts on knowledge retention during CPT. Our experiments are conducted across multiple multimodal tasks, utilizing Qwen2.5-VL-7B-Instruct as the base model. The investigation yields two significant findings: (1) When continuously learning on downstream tasks, SFT leads to catastrophic forgetting of previously learned tasks. In contrast, RFT inherently preserves prior knowledge and achieves performance comparable to multi-task training. (2) RFT successfully protects and even enhances the model's general knowledge on standard benchmarks, while SFT degrades general model capabilities severely. Further analysis reveals that this stability is not primarily due to explicit mechanisms like KL penalty or chain-of-thought reasoning. We investigate RFT's learning dynamics and find that its selective update mechanism inherently prevents interference with established knowledge. Based on this insight, we propose a rollout-based instance filtering algorithm (RIF-RFT) that enhances the training efficiency of RFT by focusing on learnable samples. Our comprehensive study demonstrates the superiority of RFT as a robust paradigm for continual post-training.
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UNVERDICTED 8representative citing papers
Later-domain RL training harms earlier domains via second-order damage concentrated in a low-dimensional shared conflict subspace; brief domain refresh contracts this component to enable selective recovery.
RPSFT improves the in-domain versus out-of-domain performance trade-off during LLM supervised fine-tuning by penalizing rotations in pretrained singular subspaces as a proxy for loss-sensitive directions.
LifeLong-RFT applies chunking-level on-policy reinforcement learning with Quantized Action Consistency Reward, Continuous Trajectory Alignment Reward, and Format Compliance Reward to fine-tune VLA models, achieving a 22% average success rate gain over supervised fine-tuning on the LIBERO benchmark's
Online RL fine-tuning forgets less than SFT because it is implicitly biased toward KL-minimal solutions among all policies that solve the new task.
The paper reformulates industrial continual learning for LLMs as a closed-loop ecosystem problem, identifies three core challenges, and organizes solutions around five lifecycle design principles.
ConSFT is a gradient-scaling fine-tuning objective for flow-matching VLAs that bounds parameter disruption via model-confidence weighting, yielding over 20% better capability retention than vanilla SFT on LIBERO and RoboTwin.
CRAFT is a continual learning method for LLMs that learns low-rank interventions on hidden representations, using a unified KL-divergence objective to handle task routing by output divergence, forgetting control via prior-state regularization, and intervention merging.
citing papers explorer
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Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting in Visual Continual Learning with Reinforcement Fine-Tuning
RaPO reduces catastrophic forgetting in visual continual learning by shaping rewards around policy drift and stabilizing advantages with cross-task exponential moving averages during reinforcement fine-tuning of multimodal models.
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Preserving Foundational Capabilities in Flow-Matching VLAs through Conservative SFT
ConSFT is a gradient-scaling fine-tuning objective for flow-matching VLAs that bounds parameter disruption via model-confidence weighting, yielding over 20% better capability retention than vanilla SFT on LIBERO and RoboTwin.