Xinyuan Cao
Author directory2026
Retrievable Gradients: Continual Post-Training Without Cumulative Weight Drift
Weihang Su | Jiacheng Kang | Jingyan Xu | Qingyao Ai | Jianming Long | Hanwen Zhang | Bangde Du | Xinyuan Cao | Min Zhang | Yiqun Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Weihang Su | Jiacheng Kang | Jingyan Xu | Qingyao Ai | Jianming Long | Hanwen Zhang | Bangde Du | Xinyuan Cao | Min Zhang | Yiqun Liu
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Continual post-training enables models to absorb emerging knowledge after deployment, but repeatedly updating shared parameters inevitably accumulates weight drift, which causes catastrophic forgetting and degrades general capabilities. Retrieval-augmented generation avoids such parameter drift, yet often lacks the depth of parametric knowledge integration. In this paper, we propose ReGrad (Retrievable Gradients), a new paradigm that treats gradients as retrievable units of knowledge. ReGrad pre-computes document-specific gradients offline, stores them in an indexed Gradient Bank, and retrieves only query-relevant gradients at inference time for temporary weight adaptation. However, raw language-modeling gradients are optimized for token-level document reconstruction rather than for query-driven knowledge use. We therefore introduce a bi-level meta-learning objective that reshapes document-derived gradients into generalizable adaptation signals for downstream tasks. Experiments across general and domain-specific settings show that ReGrad outperforms CPT and RAG baselines, enabling scalable and reversible parametric knowledge injection without accumulating weight drift.