Equation 17 · The Hardest Unsolved Problems in Small and On-Device AI
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where is the old optimum for parameter i and sets how strongly the old task is protected. This equation exposes the actual trade rather than resolving it: raising protects old knowledge at the direct expense of how much the new update is allowed to change the model, and there is no value of that removes the trade — only one that relocates it. It also exposes a cost specific to on-device deployment: computing and storing for every parameter, and doing so repeatedly as the device keeps learning, is itself memory and compute that a phone-class budget has to find room for, on top of whatever the update itself costs.
Sources cited in the article section
- [9] Continual Learning of Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey ↗
- [10] Online Continual Learning for Embedded Devices ↗
- [13] On-Device Language Models: A Comprehensive Review ↗
- [11] Catastrophic Forgetting in LLMs: A Comparative Analysis Across Language Tasks ↗
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