# Task Vector Descent: Learning from Non-IID Batches

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05402 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05402/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 54 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Communication-Efficient Learning of Deep Networks from Decentralized Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.05629/) (2016)
- [Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.06180/) (2023)
- [Qwen2.5 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15115/) (2024)
- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [DAPO: An Open-Source LLM Reinforcement Learning System at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14476/) (2025)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [Model soups: averaging weights of multiple fine-tuned models improves accuracy without increasing inference time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05482/) (2022)
- [Continual Lifelong Learning with Neural Networks: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07569/) (2018)
- [Averaging Weights Leads to Wider Optima and Better Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05407/) (2018)
- [Qwen2.5-Coder Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12186/) (2024)
- [Editing Models with Task Arithmetic](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04089/) (2022)
- [On First-Order Meta-Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.02999/) (2018)
- [TIES-Merging: Resolving Interference When Merging Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01708/) (2023)
- [Introduction to Online Convex Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.05207/) (2019)
- [Robust fine-tuning of zero-shot models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01903/) (2021)
- [MetaMath: Bootstrap Your Own Mathematical Questions for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12284/) (2023)
- [Compressive Transformers for Long-Range Sequence Modelling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05507/) (2019)
- [An Empirical Investigation of Catastrophic Forgetting in Gradient-Based Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6211/) (2013)
- [Language Models are Super Mario: Absorbing Abilities from Homologous Models as a Free Lunch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03099/) (2023)
- [Linear Mode Connectivity and the Lottery Ticket Hypothesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.05671/) (2019)
- [Merging Models with Fisher-Weighted Averaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09832/) (2021)
- [Loss Surfaces, Mode Connectivity, and Fast Ensembling of DNNs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10026/) (2018)
- [Git Re-Basin: Merging Models modulo Permutation Symmetries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04836/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

A central challenge in continual learning is to acquire new knowledge without forgetting what the model has already learned. This challenge appears in language model training when training data comes from various domain-, user-, or task-specific distributions that are encountered unevenly over time. In such settings, successive minibatches are temporally clustered by distribution instead of being sampled i.i.d. from the overall data mixture. Training on temporally clustered data induces a stability-plasticity tradeoff. Adapting the model to the active distribution can improve the model on the active distribution but may lead to a performance degradation on data it previously trained on. We find that this tradeoff intensifies with longer exposure to the same distribution. We therefore ask if the parameter displacement produced by such a sequence (the task vector) should be fully retained or applied partially. We compare applying the full displacement (λ=1) with partial integration, which scales the task vector by λ before applying it to the continuing model and scales the optimizer state by the same coefficient. Across continual pretraining, pretraining from random initialization, supervised post-training, and reinforcement post-training, we find that intermediate values of λ often improve average continuing-model performance relative to full integration, particularly after longer same-distribution sequences. In continual-pretraining experiments with both controlled streams and naturally defined adaptation sequences, task-vector scaling outperforms full integration at the matched learning rate, showing that its benefits are not reproduced by learning-rate scaling alone.