REVIEW 3 major objections 5 minor 32 references
Full-Parameter Continual Pretraining of Gemma2: Insights into Fluency and Domain Knowledge
T0 review · 3 major / 5 minor · reviewed 2026-08-15 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read Using Elastic Weight Consolidation, this paper continually pretrains all of Gemma2's parameters on Lithuanian text and reports that English fluency and domain knowledge are preserved on every benchmark tested, while Lithuanian improves on…
desk verdict A clean, reproducible empirical data point: EWC lets you add Lithuanian to Gemma2-2B without wrecking English, but the MMLU circularity and single runs make the headline counts softer than they look. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The load-bearing object is the EWC regularizer, $L_B(\theta)+\frac{\lambda}{2}\sum_i F_i(\theta_i-\theta_{A,i})^2$, where $F_i$ is the empirical Fisher information of the model on MMLU data before continual pretraining. This penalty slows the movement of parameters that MMLU gradients mark as carrying domain knowledge, while leaving the rest of the model free to adapt to Lithuanian. The authors compute $F_i$ from gradients of the log-likelihood on MMLU question-answer pairs, so the identity of the protected knowledge is set entirely by what MMLU represents.
What would settle it
Run the identical Lithuanian continual-pretraining protocol but estimate Fisher information on a single held-out benchmark (for example ARC-Easy) instead of MMLU; if the other six English benchmarks still stay flat the choice of MMLU is incidental, but if they drop, the paper's claim that MMLU-based Fisher protects domain knowledge fails for this setup.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
The central claim is that EWC regularisation, with Fisher information estimated on MMLU, turns what would otherwise be a catastrophic forgetting event into a net gain. Without EWC ($\lambda = 0$), English benchmark accuracy drops substantially after Lithuanian pretraining; with an intermediate regularisation strength (roughly $\lambda \in [10^2, 10^{11}]$), English accuracy is preserved on all seven benchmarks, and Lithuanian accuracy is higher than the untrained model on five of them. The paper states the result plainly: EWC mitigated catastrophic forgetting in the English component in linguistic fluency and domain knowledge in 7 of 7 cases, and improved the Lithuanian component in fluency and domain knowledge on 5 of 7 language-understanding benchmarks.
Load-bearing premise
The argument stands on the assumption that Fisher information computed on MMLU identifies the parameters underlying general domain knowledge, so that freezing them protects competence beyond MMLU; the paper itself notes that this step lacks a theoretical justification.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- Adding Lithuanian under EWC preserves English fluency (perplexity) and English accuracy on all seven tested benchmarks, whereas the same pretraining without EWC degrades them.
- The same run raises Lithuanian accuracy above the untrained baseline on ARC-Easy, GSM8K, HellaSwag, MMLU, and WinoGrande, while keeping Belebele and TruthfulQA stable.
- Very strong regularisation ($\lambda>10^{11}$) freezes the model so that it neither forgets English nor learns Lithuanian, bracketing an operational range for $\lambda$ between roughly $10^2$ and $10^{11}$.
Reading between the lines
- Nothing in the results ties the protected knowledge to a specific language, so a natural extension is to compute Fisher information on a mix of MMLU and Lithuanian text and check whether preservation survives on a held-out domain that MMLU underrepresents, such as code or medicine.
- If the MMLU-derived Fisher mask generalises across domains, the same mask could be reused when adding other languages or modalities, turning EWC into a one-time audit of which parameters carry a pretrained model's competence.
- Because the report covers one random seed and one data slice (10%), the 5/7 Lithuanian improvements could partly reflect dataset ordering or benchmark proximity to MMLU; repeating the run on a different slice of the Lithuanian corpus would test the stability of that result.
- The observed co-occurrence of lower perplexity and higher benchmark accuracy, if causal, would make fluency training a proxy objective for domain knowledge in low-resource languages, a claim that is testable on other language pairs.
Signed reviews
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. This preprint reports a continual-pretraining experiment in which the authors take Gemma2-2B-it, autoregressively train on 10% of the Lithuanian portion of CulturaX, and use Elastic Weight Consolidation with Fisher information computed on MMLU to preserve prior knowledge. The authors evaluate English and Lithuanian linguistic fluency via perplexity and domain knowledge via seven standard benchmarks, and report that EWC preserves English fluency and accuracy on all seven benchmarks while improving Lithuanian performance on five of seven. The paper is a technical report with hyperparameters and open-sourced code.
Significance. If the results hold, the paper makes a useful practical contribution: it suggests that a simple regularizer can add a low-resource language to an LLM without original training data and with modest degradation of general competence. The paper is also honest about limitations, including the lack of theoretical justification for the Fisher source. However, the strongest evidence is weakened by using MMLU as both the Fisher source and an evaluation benchmark, and by the absence of uncertainty quantification, so the practical significance hinges on further validation.
major comments (3)
- [Section 3, Eq. (4) and Table 1] The claim of '7/7 cases' in the abstract and Section 1 is inflated by circularity: Eq. (4) in Section 3 estimates Fisher information on MMLU, and MMLU is one of the seven benchmarks in Table 1. The English preservation result should be recomputed excluding MMLU (6/6) and, ideally, with the Fisher computed on a different benchmark to demonstrate that the penalty protects general domain knowledge rather than MMLU-specific skills. As written, the paper's own Limitations section acknowledges the need for a theoretical justification, but an empirical de-circularization is absent.
- [Section 4, Figures 1-3] All headline counts in Section 4 and Figure 3 come from single-run evaluations without error bars, confidence intervals, or multiple seeds. The differences between λ values that determine '7/7' and '5/7' may be within run-to-run noise, especially on benchmarks like TruthfulQA where the gaps appear small. The paper should report variance estimates at least for the selected λ values, or explicitly frame the results as observations from a single run rather than statistically supported claims.
- [Section 4 and Conclusions] The contributions do not specify which value of λ produces the reported improvements. Figure 3 shows that the optimal λ varies by benchmark (e.g., GSM8K appears preserved at high λ while other benchmarks may require lower λ). The authors should define a prespecified selection rule (for example, the largest λ that preserves English fluency within a tolerance) and then report the Lithuanian benchmark counts for that λ, rather than inferring 5/7 from visual inspection of the full sweep.
minor comments (5)
- [Section 3, Linguistic fluency] The perplexity computation on TruthfulQA is underspecified; please state whether the perplexity is computed over the answer tokens conditioned on the question, and how the Lithuanian translation is obtained.
- [Figure captions] Figure captions refer to 'Fine-tuned' as 'autoregressive pretraining with EWC regularisation,' but the λ=0 curve is also fine-tuned without EWC; the label should be clarified (e.g., 'continually pretrained' versus 'initial model').
- [Section 3, Domain knowledge] The Lithuanian benchmarks from references [21,22] are used for evaluation, but their construction, number of instances, and translation methodology are not described; this is important for assessing the validity of the Lithuanian domain-knowledge results.
- [Figure 2 and Section 3] Figure 2 caption says 'LT-Llama-13B' while the text uses 'LT-Llama2-13B'; please make the notation consistent.
- [Limitations] The Limitations section should explicitly mention the lack of multi-seed runs and the MMLU circularity, since both are central to the strength of the evidence.
Circularity Check
MMLU is both the Fisher-information source and one of the seven evaluation benchmarks, so the '7/7' preservation claim is partly circular by construction.
-
fitted input called prediction
[Section 2.2 (Eq. 4), Section 3 'Domain knowledge', and Section 5 Conclusions]
"To protect the parameters of Gemma2, which are potentially responsible for domain knowledge, we use MMLU data ... for Fisher's information estimation, estimating it via the empirical Fisher estimator ... Fi = (1/|D_MMLU|) sum_{(x,y) in D_MMLU} (partial / partial theta_i log p_theta(y|x) |_{theta_i = theta_A,i})^2 ... Note that although the English version of MMLU data was used in EWC to estimate Fisher information, we included this dataset in our benchmarks because, in our opinion, its empirical performance still may be interesting."
The EWC penalty in Eqs. (3)-(4) is constructed from gradients evaluated on D_MMLU, so the regularizer explicitly penalizes parameter movement in directions that alter the conditional log-likelihood on MMLU examples. Counting MMLU accuracy among the seven benchmarks used to claim 'domain knowledge preserved in 7/7 cases' means one of the seven reported successes is not an independent held-out test of the regularizer; it is a near-neighbor of the objective used to define the penalty. The other six benchmarks provide independent evidence, so the circularity is partial, but the 7/7 headline is inflated by this overlap.
full rationale
The paper's central derivation chain is: estimate Fisher information from MMLU (Eq. 4), apply EWC while pretraining on Lithuanian CulturaX, then evaluate domain knowledge on a seven-benchmark suite and claim all seven are preserved. One link in that chain is partly circular: MMLU is simultaneously the data source for the Fisher penalty and one of the seven evaluation benchmarks. This is not a complete collapse, because the EWC penalty operates on log-likelihood while the evaluation uses accuracy, so MMLU accuracy is not strictly forced; moreover, six other English benchmarks are independent of the Fisher source, and the Lithuanian translated benchmarks provide an external check. The self-citations [21,22] to the authors' own Lithuanian benchmark translations are used as evaluation resources rather than as the justification of the main claim, so they are not load-bearing circularity. The Limitations section explicitly acknowledges that 'Our approach to evaluating Fisher information via MMLU also asks for a theoretical justification,' but a missing theoretical justification is a limitation rather than a circular step. The identifiable circularity is limited to the MMLU-in-evaluation overlap, which inflates the 7/7 count but does not by itself determine the other six results.
Assumptions & free parameters
free parameters (1)
- Regularisation strength lambda (range selection) =
10^2 to 10^11 (post hoc)
assumptions (5)
- domain assumption Perplexity on TruthfulQA and Lithuanian Q/A datasets measures linguistic fluency.
- domain assumption Accuracy on ARC, Belebele, GSM8K, HellaSwag, MMLU, TruthfulQA, and Winogrande measures domain knowledge.
- standard math The empirical Fisher estimator approximates the true Fisher information.
- domain assumption The first 10% of Lithuanian CulturaX is sufficient for fluency improvement.
- domain assumption LT-Llama2-13B is a valid reference for Lithuanian grammatical accuracy.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Full-Parameter Continual Pretraining of Gemma2: Insights into Fluency and Domain Knowledge." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/76AWD4Y2
@misc{pith2026250505946,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Full-Parameter Continual Pretraining of Gemma2: Insights into Fluency and Domain Knowledge},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/76AWD4Y2}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2505.05946}
}
read the original abstract
In this technical report, we empirically investigate the relationship between linguistic fluency and domain knowledge in the context of continual learning with large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we enhance the linguistic fluency of the Gemma2 LLM for the Lithuanian language by autoregressively pretraining its full parameter set on the first 10\% of the Lithuanian language component of the CulturaX dataset. To prevent catastrophic forgetting of the model's existing domain knowledge, we apply Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC), leveraging Fisher information estimated using data from the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark. In the post-training evaluations, we assess linguistic fluency through perplexity and evaluate domain knowledge using accuracy on a suite of language understanding benchmarks, including ARC-Easy, Belebele, GSM8K, HellaSwag, MMLU, TruthfulQA, and Winogrande, in both English and Lithuanian. The empirical results demonstrate that EWC not only mitigates catastrophic forgetting by preserving the model's performance in terms of both linguistic fluency and domain knowledge but also improves or maintains these capabilities for the newly added Lithuanian language. These findings highlight the potential for more efficient adaptation of general-purpose LLMs to under-represented languages without requiring access to the original training data. The accompanying codebase is openly accessible at https://github.com/Neurotechnology/LLM_EWC.
Figures
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Reviewed August 15, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
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