Specialists Learn Faster: Knowledge Organization in Pre-training Shapes Knowledge Update Efficiency

Abstract

An ideal (language) model must continually update its knowledge. Existing work largely focuses on making these updates efficient after training. We investigate how the organization of time-varying knowledge during pre-training shapes the efficiency of subsequent updates. Models trained on chronologically ordered knowledge specialize in the most recently encountered knowledge; we call them specialists. In contrast, models trained on the same knowledge in randomly shuffled order perform well across all represented time periods; we call them generalists. Surprisingly, specialists require far fewer update steps than generalists to acquire new knowledge. To explain this advantage, we derive a law from first principles that relates update cost to the model's optimization dynamics and that closely predicts empirical results. Guided by these findings, we design a strategy for organizing pre-training data that preserves stable historical knowledge while enabling efficient updates to current knowledge. We also show that the benefits of temporal knowledge organization extend to real-world pre-trained models and existing knowledge update tools, and generalize to other knowledge orderings. Project page: https://horizon-lab.org/specialist/