Journal article
Four Things Called Forgetting: Interference, Transience, Reset and Unlearning Remove Different Things, Why Forgetting Looks Easy by Accident and Hard on Purpose Only Under Different Instruments, and the Savings Measurement That Would Tell Them Apart
(c) 2026 Pranay Mahendrakar. Licensed under CC BY 4.0. Machine learning uses one word for four operations. Catastrophic forgetting is damage that fine-tuning does to earlier capabilities. Transience is the fading of individual training examples during ordinary training. Resets deliberately…