Self-Evolving LLMs via Continual Instruction Tuning

In real-world industrial scenarios, large language models (LLMs) require Continuous Learning (CL) to adapt to diverse tasks as opera- tional requirements diversify, demanding self-evolution capabilities to autonomously refine their knowledge and adapt to dynamic envi- ronments. However, existing CL approaches, such as replay-based and parameter isolation techniques, struggle with the catastrophic forgetting problem: new task training degrades performance on prior tasks due to the model's adaptation to new data distributions, which weakens its generalization to old tasks. To address this issue, we propose a novel parameter-efficient adversarial MoE framework, MoE-CL, for industrial-scale self-evolving continual instruction tuning of LLMs. Specifically, MoE-CL employs a dual-expert archi- tecture to enable self-evolution: a dedicated LoRA expert for each task to preserve task-specific knowledge, ensuring parameter inde- pendence and mitigating forgetting, and a shared LoRA expert to facilitate cross-task knowledge transfer. Specifically, a task-aware discriminator within a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is integrated into the shared expert to suppress task-irrelevant noise, ensuring only task-aligned knowledge is transferred during se- quential task training. Through adversarial training, the shared ex- pert learns generalized representations that mimic the task-aware discriminator, while dedicated experts retain task-specific details, balancing knowledge retention and cross-task generalization—key to the model's self-evolution by autonomously optimizing knowl- edge integration across tasks. Extensive experiments on a public MTL5 benchmark and an industrial Tencent3 benchmark validate MoE-CL's effectiveness in self-evolving continual learning. In real- world A/B testing on content compliance review in the Tencent Video Platform, MoE-CL reduced manual review costs by 15.3%,demonstrating its applicability for large-scale industrial deploy- ment where self-evolution is critical for adapting to evolving op- erational demands. Implementation code is publicly available at https://github.com/BAI-LAB/MoE-CL.