The Dangers of Fine-Tuning: When Customizing a Model Breaks Its General Knowledge

You fine-tune a model to write better code. It becomes excellent at Python. It forgets how to write poetry. You fine-tune a model to diagnose medical conditions. It becomes excellent at radiology. It forgets basic history. This is catastrophic forgetting. Teach a model one new thing, and it forgets five old ones. The new knowledge overwrites the old. The model is not learning. It is trading. This is the danger of fine-tuning. It is a double-edged sword. It makes the model better at a specific…