CAMR: Compatibility-Aware Memory Replay for Continual Learning in Large Language Models
Jingpu Yang, Tianhao Li, Fengxian Ji, Yufeng Wang, Shuxin Zheng, Xiaoqing Zhang
Abstract
Continual learning requires large language models to acquire new knowledge and capabilities while retaining what they have learned. Fine-tuning and replay support acquisition and retention, but deciding whether incoming examples need supervision and which historical examples to revisit remains a challenge. We propose Compatibility-Aware Memory Replay (CAMR), an adaptive framework that jointly controls current-example supervision and historical replay. CAMR combines compatibility checks with a learned memory gate to guide an online policy over three actions: learning incoming examples with general replay, jointly reinforcing compatible related examples, and skipping direct supervision of verified mastered duplicates. The policy learns from acquisition, retention, and training-cost feedback under a bounded per-arrival replay budget. We evaluate CAMR with Qwen3-8B-Base on continual factual updating and cross-task and cross-domain learning. On WikiBigEdit, CAMR consistently leads evaluated methods in Original Match from 3K to 100K facts, reaching 93.66% after just 3K facts and surpassing Full-history Replay (LoRA) after 100K facts. It also achieves the highest final scores on all four selected TRACE tasks and maintains or improves earlier-task performance relative to post-acquisition levels in a sequence spanning financial question answering, mathematical reasoning, code generation, and summarization.