Self-Evolving LLMs via Continual Instruction Tuning

Abstract

In real-world industrial settings, large language models (LLMs) must learn continually to keep pace with diverse and evolving tasks, requiring self-evolution to refine knowledge under dynamic data distributions. However, existing continual learning (CL) approaches, such as replay and parameter isolation, often suffer from catastrophic forgetting: training on new tasks degrades performance on earlier ones by overfitting to the new distribution and weakening generalization.We propose MoE-CL, a parameter-efficient adversarial mixture-of-experts framework for industrial-scale, self-evolving continual instruction tuning of LLMs. MoE-CL uses a dual-expert design: (1) a dedicated LoRA expert per task to preserve task-specific knowledge via parameter independence, mitigating forgetting; and (2) a shared LoRA expert to enable cross-task transfer. To prevent transferring task-irrelevant noise through the shared pathway, we integrate a task-aware discriminator within a GAN. The discriminator encourages the shared expert to pass only task-aligned information during sequential training. Through adversarial learning, the shared expert acquires generalized representations that mimic the discriminator, while dedicated experts retain task-specific details, balancing knowledge retention and cross-task generalization and thereby supporting self-evolution.Extensive experiments on the public MTL5 benchmark and an industrial Tencent3 benchmark validate the effectiveness of MoE-CL for continual instruction tuning. In real-world A/B testing for content compliance review on the Tencent Video platform, MoE-CL reduced manual review costs by 15.3%. These results demonstrate that MoE-CL is practical for large-scale industrial deployment where continual adaptation and stable transfer are critical.