Mechanistic Analysis of Catastrophic Forgetting in Large Language Models During Continual Fine-tuning

arXiv:2601.18699v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sequential fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) adaptation to target tasks often triggers catastrophic forgetting, where the acquisition of novel target skills degrades ancestral capabilities. This paper presents a systematic comparative study of catastrophic forgetting across twenty premier models representing the state-of-the-art in mid-2026. We categorize our investigation into two primary research lines: (i) a behavioral and semantic output drift analysis of ten leading closed-source models (including Claude Fable 5, GPT-5.5

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