Self-Evolving LLMs via Continual Instruction Tuning
This work addresses the need for self-evolving LLMs to adapt to dynamic tasks in industrial applications, offering an incremental improvement over existing continual learning methods.
The paper tackles the problem of catastrophic forgetting in continual learning for large language models (LLMs) in industrial settings, proposing MoE-CL, a parameter-efficient adversarial mixture-of-experts framework that reduces manual review costs by 15.3% in real-world A/B testing.
In real-world industrial settings, large language models (LLMs) must learn continually to keep pace with diverse and evolving tasks, requiring self-evolution to refine knowledge under dynamic data distributions. However, existing continual learning (CL) approaches, such as replay and parameter isolation, often suffer from catastrophic forgetting: training on new tasks degrades performance on earlier ones by overfitting to the new distribution and weakening generalization.We propose MoE-CL, a parameter-efficient adversarial mixture-of-experts framework for industrial-scale, self-evolving continual instruction tuning of LLMs. MoE-CL uses a dual-expert design: (1) a dedicated LoRA expert per task to preserve task-specific knowledge via parameter independence, mitigating forgetting; and (2) a shared LoRA expert to enable cross-task transfer. To prevent transferring task-irrelevant noise through the shared pathway, we integrate a task-aware discriminator within a GAN. The discriminator encourages the shared expert to pass only task-aligned information during sequential training. Through adversarial learning, the shared expert acquires generalized representations that mimic the discriminator, while dedicated experts retain task-specific details, balancing knowledge retention and cross-task generalization and thereby supporting self-evolution.Extensive experiments on the public MTL5 benchmark and an industrial Tencent3 benchmark validate the effectiveness of MoE-CL for continual instruction tuning. In real-world A/B testing for content compliance review on the Tencent Video platform, MoE-CL reduced manual review costs by 15.3%. These results demonstrate that MoE-CL is practical for large-scale industrial deployment where continual adaptation and stable transfer are critical.