REVIEW 3 major objections 6 minor 16 references
Knowledge Swapping via Learning and Unlearning
T0 review · 3 major / 6 minor · reviewed 2026-08-08 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read This paper introduces Knowledge Swapping, a task that forgets specified classes, keeps the rest, and learns new ones, and argues the reliable recipe is to learn first and forget second.
desk verdict A useful new task and benchmark, but the claimed 'learning before forgetting' principle is confounded with which phase is last, and the feature-hierarchy story is not supported by the paper's own control. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The load-bearing object is the directional feature hierarchy, operationalized through low-rank adaptation matrices $\Delta W = AB$ attached to the FFN linear layers of each transformer block, with group sparse regularization on $\lVert A_k \rVert_F^2 + \lVert B_k \rVert_F^2$ to retain only needed modules. The forgetting phase uses a boundary-constrained loss $\mathcal{L}_{\text{forget}} = \mathrm{ReLU}(\mathrm{BND} - \mathcal{L}(f(X_f),Y_f))$ so erasure is stabilized while retention and learning losses continue. The machinery converts the ordering insight into a concrete two-stage update: learn low-level features before high-level erasure, so the forgetting pass stays confined to semantic layers and cannot be undone by later low-level changes.
What would settle it
Measure per-block parameter-change statistics during learn-only and forget-only runs on the classification and detection models used in the paper's main tables: if learning updates are not concentrated in early blocks or forgetting updates are not concentrated in late blocks, the directional hierarchy that motivates the learn-first order is falsified.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
The central discovery is the directional feature hierarchy: in the studied transformer models, incremental learning progresses from low-level representations to higher-level semantic features, whereas targeted forgetting moves from high-level semantics down to low-level features. From this the paper derives the Learning Before Forgetting principle, a two-stage procedure that first fine-tunes on the learning set (with retention-set supervision) and only then runs selective forgetting. Empirically, this single ordering choice drives forget-set accuracy, mIoU, or mAP to near zero across image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation, while the reverse order lets forgotten classes rebound after the learning phase because low-level changes invalidate the earlier high-level erasure.
Load-bearing premise
The entire ordering argument rests on the claim that learning always builds from low-level to high-level features while forgetting erases from high-level down to low-level, a directionality the paper reads off parameter-norm plots rather than proves with quantitative layer-wise statistics.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- For any two-stage knowledge-editing pipeline on a pretrained transformer, the paper predicts learn-first beats forget-first: with low-rank adaptation and group sparsity, forget-set accuracy falls to near zero while retention and learning accuracy stay high.
- The reverse order should show a rebound: after an initial drop, forgetting-set accuracy climbs back because the learning phase perturbs low-level parameters that the earlier forgetting pass relied on.
- Adding a second forgetting pass after forget-then-learn restores erasure, which the paper reads as evidence that the rebound is caused by low-level re-activation rather than incomplete erasure.
- The ordering advantage transfers across tasks and architectures: image classification on ImageNet-100, semantic segmentation on ADE20K, and object detection on COCO all follow the same learn-first pattern.
Reading between the lines
- If the directional hierarchy is a general property of transformer training, the learn-then-forget ordering should extend beyond low-rank adaptation to other parameter-efficient editing schemes, including unlearning in large language models: fine-tune on new capabilities before erasing unwanted behaviors.
- The paper's evidence for hierarchy direction is visual inspection of L2 norm differences on three segmentation settings; a quantitative per-block change statistic with variance bars would turn the principle into a measurable invariant and could predict which classes are easy or hard to forget.
- The boundary loss suggests a testable extension: sweeping the BND threshold and measuring the forget-versus-retain trade-off curve would reveal whether near-zero forgetting accuracy is a robust plateau or a knife-edge result.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper introduces Knowledge Swapping, a task in which a pretrained model must simultaneously learn new knowledge, retain existing knowledge, and forget user-specified knowledge. The authors propose a two-stage pipeline built on LoRA and group sparse regularization, and claim that performing the learning phase before the forgetting phase ('Learning Before Forgetting') yields substantially better results than the reverse order. The claimed explanation is a feature-hierarchy discovery: incremental learning progresses from low-level to high-level features, while forgetting proceeds from high-level to low-level features. The paper validates the strategy with experiments on ImageNet-100 classification, COCO-based object detection, and ADE20K-based semantic segmentation, and releases source code.
Significance. If the central claim is correct, the paper offers a simple and practically useful design principle for selective model editing: when swapping knowledge, train the new task before unlearning the old one. The task formulation itself is clear and the experimental sweep across three vision tasks is a strength, as is the public code release. However, the paper's key non-tautological claim—that the order matters because of a directional feature hierarchy—is currently undermined by a comparison that confounds order with which objective is optimized last, and by evidence for the hierarchy that is only qualitative. The benchmark is therefore not yet established to the standard needed for a strong claim.
major comments (3)
- [§5.3, Table 2] The central comparison L→F versus F→L is confounded because the two sequences end with different optimization objectives. In L→F, the final phase minimizes Eq. (8), which directly drives the forgetting-set metric toward zero; in F→L, the final phase minimizes Eq. (7), which contains no forgetting term. The rebound of mIoUf after F→L is therefore expected even without any feature-hierarchy effect. This is confirmed by the F→L→F rows of Table 2, where adding a single final forgetting phase reduces mIoUf to 0.08–0.39 across the four datasets, comparable to the L→F rows. The large gap in Tables 1–3 between L→F and F→L thus does not establish the Learning Before Forgetting principle; it is consistent with the simpler rule that the unlearning phase should be last. Please add conditions that hold the final phase fixed while varying the order, or otherwise isolate the order effect.
- [§3.2, Discovery-I] Discovery-I is the sole mechanistic basis for the Learning Before Forgetting principle, but it is inferred from visual inspection of L2-norm and gradient curves (Figures 2, 4, and 6) on three semantic-segmentation settings. There are no quantitative layer-wise statistics, no error bars, and no analogous measurement on the classification or detection models used in Tables 1 and 3. The claim that learning progresses from low-level to high-level features and forgetting from high-level to low-level is therefore not tested on the models where the main results are reported. Please provide per-layer statistics (e.g., mean and variance of weight updates relative to pretrained weights) for all three task families, and check whether the observed pattern could be an artifact of the group-sparse LoRA regularization rather than an inherent property of learning and forgetting.
- [§5.1–§5.4, Tables 1–3] All results are single runs with no seeds or error bars. For a benchmark paper, variance estimates across at least three seeds are necessary to assess whether the observed margins are repeatable and whether the per-task hyperparameter choices (α, β, and BND reported in §5.1) materially affect the conclusions. Without such estimates, the quantitative claims in Sections 5.2–5.4 are not yet established to the standard expected for a benchmark.
minor comments (6)
- [§4.3] The heading 'Sparse Constriant' should be 'Sparse Constraint'.
- [§2.2] The word 'whiestimatetes' in the related-work paragraph should be 'which estimates'.
- [Tables 1–3] The notation in the tables, e.g., 'L− →F', is hard to parse; please use a consistent arrow notation and explain it in the captions.
- [§3.2] The term 'knock-on feature hierarchy' is non-standard; consider renaming it to something like 'feature-hierarchy interplay' for clarity.
- [§5.1] Oxford-IIIT Pet appears as a learning set in both the classification and segmentation setups; please clarify whether the splits and data composition differ between the two tasks.
- [§2 and §5] The paper surveys many continual-learning and machine-unlearning methods but includes none of them as experimental baselines; adding at least one adapted baseline would make the proposed benchmark more informative.
Circularity Check
No significant circularity: the order comparison is empirical and the reported scores are measured outcomes, not fitted parameters or definitional identities.
full rationale
The paper's central claim is an empirical ordering strategy (Learning Before Forgetting). The losses in Eqs. 5-9 define two distinct pipelines; L→F and F→L are different optimization sequences, and the reported accuracy/mIoU values are measured results, not quantities that reduce to the loss definitions by construction. Discovery-I (Section 3.2) is inferred from the same segmentation experiments later used in Table 2, which is an in-sample-evidence limitation and a potential confound: F→L ends with a learning phase whose loss (Eqs. 5-7) has no forgetting term, so the rebound of forgetting accuracy is partly expected; the F→L→F rows in Table 2 further suggest the final phase dominates. However, this is a confound or alternative explanation, not a circular derivation: no equation is defined in terms of the conclusion, no fitted parameter is renamed as a prediction, and no load-bearing self-citation is used. The method relies on external, independently established components (LoRA, Lasso/group sparsity, standard losses). Hence no formal circularity; the concern belongs to correctness or experimental design rather than circularity.
Assumptions & free parameters
free parameters (4)
- alpha (learning and forgetting phases) =
0.05 for classification learning; 0.01 for detection/segmentation learning and all forgetting phases
- beta (learning phase) =
0.2 (classification), 0.9 (detection/segmentation)
- beta (forgetting phase) =
0.2 (all tasks)
- BND (forgetting boundary) =
105 (classification), 15 (detection), 115 (segmentation)
assumptions (5)
- domain assumption Transformer linear layers, particularly FFNs, are the primary storage of model knowledge (citing Geva et al., 2020).
- domain assumption Earlier layers encode low-level features and later layers encode high-level semantics in the tested models.
- standard math Group Lasso regularization with Frobenius norms induces group sparsity.
- domain assumption Group Lasso on LoRA A and B matrices selectively isolates task-relevant modules without damaging retained knowledge.
- domain assumption The forgetting and retention sets are disjoint subsets of pretraining data and the learning set is a new task.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Knowledge Swapping via Learning and Unlearning." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/V2MAJTJM
@misc{pith2026250208075,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Knowledge Swapping via Learning and Unlearning},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/V2MAJTJM}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2502.08075}
}
read the original abstract
We introduce \textbf{Knowledge Swapping}, a novel task designed to selectively regulate knowledge of a pretrained model by enabling the forgetting of user\-specified information, retaining essential knowledge, and acquiring new knowledge simultaneously. By delving into the analysis of knock-on feature hierarchy, we find that incremental learning typically progresses from low\-level representations to higher\-level semantics, whereas forgetting tends to occur in the opposite direction\-starting from high-level semantics and moving down to low-level features. Building upon this, we propose to benchmark the knowledge swapping task with the strategy of \textit{Learning Before Forgetting}. Comprehensive experiments on various tasks like image classification, object detection, and semantic segmentation validate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy. The source code is available at \href{https://github.com/xingmingyu123456/KnowledgeSwapping}{https://github.com/xingmingyu123456/KnowledgeSwapping}.
Figures
Figures from the paper (4 more)
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[4]
Hoiem, D., Divvala, S. K., and Hays, J. H. Pascal voc 2008 challenge. World Literature Today, 24(1):1–4,
work page 2008
-
[10]
M., Vedaldi, A., Zisserman, A., and Jawahar, C
Parkhi, O. M., Vedaldi, A., Zisserman, A., and Jawahar, C. Cats and dogs. In 2012 IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition , pp. 3498–3505. IEEE,
2012
-
[13]
The caltech-ucsd birds-200-2011 dataset
Wah, C., Branson, S., Welinder, P., Perona, P., and Belongie, S. The caltech-ucsd birds-200-2011 dataset
2011
-
[15]
Defensive unlearning with adversarial training for robust concept erasure in diffusion models
Zhang, Y ., Chen, X., Jia, J., Zhang, Y ., Fan, C., Liu, J., Hong, M., Ding, K., and Liu, S. Defensive unlearning with adversarial training for robust concept erasure in diffusion models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.15234,
-
[16]
A model or 603 exemplars: Towards memory-efficient class- incremental learning
Zhou, D.-W., Wang, Q.-W., Ye, H.-J., and Zhan, D.-C. A model or 603 exemplars: Towards memory-efficient class- incremental learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.13218,
-
[2006]
Zhang, H., Li, F., Liu, S., Zhang, L., Su, H., Zhu, J., Ni, L. M., and Shum, H.-Y . Dino: Detr with improved denois- ing anchor boxes for end-to-end object detection. arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.03605,
-
[2009]
J., Shen, Y ., Wallis, P., Allen-Zhu, Z., Li, Y ., Wang, S., Wang, L., and Chen, W
Hu, E. J., Shen, Y ., Wallis, P., Allen-Zhu, Z., Li, Y ., Wang, S., Wang, L., and Chen, W. Lora: Low-rank adaptation of large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2106.09685,
-
[2011]
Deep- globe 2018: A challenge to parse the earth through satel- lite images
Demir, I., Koperski, K., Lindenbaum, D., Pang, G., Huang, J., Basu, S., Hughes, F., Tuia, D., and Raskar, R. Deep- globe 2018: A challenge to parse the earth through satel- lite images. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition workshops, pp. 172–181,
work page 2018
Show all 16 references
-
[2012]
Rebuffi, S.-A., Kolesnikov, A., Sperl, G., and Lampert, C. H. icarl: Incremental classifier and representation learning. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 2001–2010,
2001
-
[2015]
and Liu, H
Liu, H. and Liu, H. Continual learning with recursive gra- dient optimization. arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.12522 ,
-
[2017]
A., Rabinowitz, N
Rusu, A. A., Rabinowitz, N. C., Desjardins, G., Soyer, H., Kirkpatrick, J., Kavukcuoglu, K., Pascanu, R., and Had- sell, R. Progressive neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.04671,
-
[2019]
Transformer feed-forward layers are key-value memories
Geva, M., Schuster, R., Berant, J., and Levy, O. Transformer feed-forward layers are key-value memories. arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.14913,
2012 arXiv
-
[2021]
Llm-assisted multi-teacher continual learning for visual question answering in robotic surgery
Chen, K., Du, Y ., You, T., Islam, M., Guo, Z., Jin, Y ., Chen, G., and Heng, P.-A. Llm-assisted multi-teacher continual learning for visual question answering in robotic surgery. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.16664,
-
[2022]
Model sparsity can simplify machine unlearning
9 Knowledge Swapping via Learning and Unlearning Liu, J., Ram, P., Yao, Y ., Liu, G., Liu, Y ., SHARMA, P., Liu, S., et al. Model sparsity can simplify machine unlearning. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 36, 2024a. Liu, S., Yao, Y ., Jia, J., Casper, S., Bar...
-
[2023]
Lin, T.-Y ., Maire, M., Belongie, S., Hays, J., Perona, P., Ra- manan, D., Doll´ar, P., and Zitnick, C. L. Microsoft coco: Common objects in context. In Computer Vision–ECCV 2014: 13th European Conference, Zurich, Switzerland, September 6-12, 2014, Proceedings, Part V 13, pp. 740–
2014
-
[2024]
Atlas: Adapter-based multi-modal continual learning with a two-stage learning strategy
Li, H., Tan, Z., Li, X., and Huang, W. Atlas: Adapter-based multi-modal continual learning with a two-stage learning strategy. arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.10923,
Reviewed August 8, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.