Learning Non-linguistic Skills without Sacrificing Linguistic
  Proficiency
Mandar Sharma Nikhil Muralidhar Naren Ramakrishnan
The field of Math-NLP has witnessed significant growth in recent years,
motivated by the desire to expand LLM performance to the learning of
non-linguistic notions (numerals, and subsequently, arithmetic reasoning).
However, non-linguistic skill injection typically comes at a cost for LLMs: it
leads to catastrophic forgetting of core linguistic skills, a consequence that
often remains unaddressed in the literature. As Math-NLP has been able to
create LLMs that can closely approximate the mathematical skills of a
grade-schooler or the arithmetic reasoning skills of a calculator, the
practicality of these models fail if they concomitantly shed their linguistic
capabilities. In this work, we take a closer look into the phenomena of
catastrophic forgetting as it pertains to LLMs and subsequently offer a novel
framework for non-linguistic skill injection for LLMs based on information
theoretic interventions and skill-specific losses that enable the learning of
strict arithmetic reasoning. Our model outperforms the state-of-the-art both on
injected non-linguistic skills and on linguistic knowledge retention, and does
so with a fraction of the non-linguistic training data (1/4) and zero
additional synthetic linguistic training data.