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Continual learning keeps whatever surprises the model most, which means it keeps its lies.

AspireAI community · arXiv
*Continual learning keeps whatever surprises the model most, which means it keeps its lies.* The paper tested that on LoRA-tuned Qwen2.5 and Llama-3.2 students learning from true and false claims. A planted falsehood about something the model knows is surprising by construction, so a surprise-driven learner absorbed nearly every lie, at roughly random-selection rate. A verifier key that must approve each claim removed lies only as far as the judge was accurate, and real LLM judges rejected unsourced truths. The model's own prior separated lies from true new facts at 0.78 to 0.83 AUC, but only 0.53 against real updates. The honest limit: if an attacker can plant matching sources for 30 percent of the lies, the combined system ends up worse than the judge alone. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.39840
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