catastrophic forgetting
/ˌkætəˈstrɒfɪk fərˈɡetɪŋ/
losing previously learned capabilities when trained on new data
catastrophic forgetting in a sentence
“Fine-tuning on legal texts caused catastrophic forgetting of medical knowledge.”
Origin of catastrophic forgetting
Greek katastrophē overturning + Old English forgiettan to lose from memory
Related Words
repetition loop
getting stuck generating the same phrase or pattern repeatedly
context overflow
exceeding a model's context limit, which may cause a request to fail or content to be truncated, compacted, or omitted
semantic drift
subtle shifts in meaning of key terms through a conversation
overconfidence
expressing certainty beyond what the model's actual knowledge warrants
lost in the middle
the tendency to miss information buried midway through a long context
refusal
a model declining a request, sometimes wrongly, when it misreads intent as harmful