Recent rehearsal-free continual learning (CL) methods guided by prompts achieve strong performance on vision tasks with non-stationary data but remain resource-intensive, hindering real-world edge deployment. We introduce resource-efficient prompting (REP), which improves the computational and memory efficiency of prompt-based rehearsal-free continual learning methods while minimizing accuracy trade-offs. Our approach employs swift prompt selection to refine input data using a carefully provisioned model and introduces adaptive token merging (AToM) and adaptive layer dropping (ALD) for efficient prompt updates. AToM and ALD selectively skip data and model layers while preserving task-specific features during the learning of new tasks. Extensive experiments on multiple image classification datasets demonstrate REP's superior resource efficiency over state-of-the-art rehearsal-free CL methods.
Suzhou University of Science and Technology（苏州科技大学）；Tianjin University（天津大学）
Rehearsal, retraining on a stored small data subset of old tasks, has been proven effective in solving catastrophic forgetting in continual learning. However, due to the sampled data may have a large bias towards the original dataset, retraining them is susceptible to driving continual domain drift of old tasks in feature space, resulting in forgetting. In this paper, we focus on tackling the continual domain drift problem with centroid distance distillation. First, we propose a centroid caching mechanism for sampling data points based on constructed centroids to reduce the sample bias in rehe…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab（MIT-IBM沃森人工智能实验室）；Rice University（莱斯大学）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）
Computer vision models suffer from a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting when learning novel concepts from continuously shifting training data. Typical solutions for this continual learning problem require extensive rehearsal of previously seen data, which increases memory costs and may violate data privacy. Recently, the emergence of large-scale pre-trained vision transformer models has enabled prompting approaches as an alternative to data-rehearsal. These approaches rely on a key-query mechanism to generate prompts and have been found to be highly resistant to catastrophic forgettin…
Learning from non-stationary data streams and overcoming catastrophic forgetting still poses a serious challenge for machine learning research. Rather than aiming to improve state-of-the-art, in this work we provide insight into the limits and merits of rehearsal, one of continual learning's most established methods. We hypothesize that models trained sequentially with rehearsal tend to stay in the same low-loss region after a task has finished, but are at risk of overfitting on its sample memory, hence harming generalization. We provide both conceptual and strong empirical evidence on three b…
University of Waikato（怀卡托大学）；LTCI, Télécom Paris（巴黎电信学院LTCI实验室）
Online continual learning (OCL) aims to train neural networks incrementally from a non-stationary data stream with a single pass through data. Rehearsal-based methods attempt to approximate the observed input distributions over time with a small memory and revisit them later to avoid forgetting. Despite its strong empirical performance, rehearsal methods still suffer from a poor approximation of the loss landscape of past data with memory samples. This paper revisits the rehearsal dynamics in online settings. We provide theoretical insights on the inherent memory overfitting risk from the view…
Continual learning aims to enable a single model to learn a sequence of tasks without catastrophic forgetting. Top-performing methods usually require a rehearsal buffer to store past pristine examples for experience replay, which, however, limits their practical value due to privacy and memory constraints. In this work, we present a simple yet effective framework, DualPrompt, which learns a tiny set of parameters, called prompts, to properly instruct a pre-trained model to learn tasks arriving sequentially without buffering past examples. DualPrompt presents a novel approach to attach compleme…
Understanding the Role of Rehearsal Scale in Continual Learning under Varying Model Capacities
Institute of Intelligent Information Processing, Shanxi University（山西大学智能信息处理研究院）；Alliance Manchester Business School, The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学阿联酋商业学院）
University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳和雷焦艾米利亚大学）；University of Catania（卡塔尼亚大学）
Rehearsal approaches enjoy immense popularity with Continual Learning (CL) practitioners. These methods collect samples from previously encountered data distributions in a small memory buffer; subsequently, they repeatedly optimize on the latter to prevent catastrophic forgetting. This work draws attention to a hidden pitfall of this widespread practice: repeated optimization on a small pool of data inevitably leads to tight and unstable decision boundaries, which are a major hindrance to generalization. To address this issue, we propose Lipschitz-DrivEn Rehearsal (LiDER), a surrogate objectiv…
Rehearsal-Free Modular and Compositional Continual Learning for Language Models
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）；Hochschule der Medien（斯图加特媒体大学）；Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences（卡尔斯鲁厄应用技术大学）
The goal of continual learning (CL) is to efficiently update a machine learning model with new data without forgetting previously-learned knowledge. Most widely-used CL methods rely on a rehearsal memory of data points to be reused while training on new data. Curating such a rehearsal memory to maintain a small, informative subset of all the data seen so far is crucial to the success of these methods. We devise a coreset selection method for rehearsal-based continual learning. Our method is based on the idea of gradient matching: The gradients induced by the coreset should match, as closely as…
A dataset is a shred of crucial evidence to describe a task. However, each data point in the dataset does not have the same potential, as some of the data points can be more representative or informative than others. This unequal importance among the data points may have a large impact in rehearsal-based continual learning, where we store a subset of the training examples (coreset) to be replayed later to alleviate catastrophic forgetting. In continual learning, the quality of the samples stored in the coreset directly affects the model's effectiveness and efficiency. The coreset selection pro…
Robotic vision is a field where continual learning can play a significant role. An embodied agent operating in a complex environment subject to frequent and unpredictable changes is required to learn and adapt continuously. In the context of object recognition, for example, a robot should be able to learn (without forgetting) objects of never before seen classes as well as improving its recognition capabilities as new instances of already known classes are discovered. Ideally, continual learning should be triggered by the availability of short videos of single objects and performed on-line on …
Face Anti-Spoofing (FAS) is recently studied under the continual learning setting, where the FAS models are expected to evolve after encountering the data from new domains. However, existing methods need extra replay buffers to store previous data for rehearsal, which becomes infeasible when previous data is unavailable because of privacy issues. In this paper, we propose the first rehearsal-free method for Domain Continual Learning (DCL) of FAS, which deals with catastrophic forgetting and unseen domain generalization problems simultaneously. For better generalization to unseen domains, we de…
University of Wroclaw（弗罗茨瓦夫大学）；Warsaw University of Technology（华沙工业大学）；Tooploox
Contemporary deep neural networks offer state-of-the-art results when applied to visual reasoning, e.g., in the context of 3D point cloud data. Point clouds are important datatype for precise modeling of three-dimensional environments, but effective processing of this type of data proves to be challenging. In the world of large, heavily-parameterized network architectures and continuously-streamed data, there is an increasing need for machine learning models that can be trained on additional data. Unfortunately, currently available models cannot fully leverage training on additional data witho…
Neural networks can achieve excellent results in a wide variety of applications. However, when they attempt to sequentially learn, they tend to learn the new task while catastrophically forgetting previous ones. We propose a model that overcomes catastrophic forgetting in sequential reinforcement learning by combining ideas from continual learning in both the image classification domain and the reinforcement learning domain. This model features a dual memory system which separates continual learning from reinforcement learning and a pseudo-rehearsal system that "recalls" items representative o…
PROL : Rehearsal Free Continual Learning in Streaming Data via Prompt Online Learning
STEM University of South Australia（南澳大利亚STEM大学）；Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR & IPAL（信息与通信研究所，A*STAR及IPAL）；Systems Research Institute, Polish Academy of Sciences（波兰科学院系统研究所）
Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；University of Twente（特文特大学）
Continual learning aims to provide intelligent agents that are capable of learning continually a sequence of tasks, building on previously learned knowledge. A key challenge in this learning paradigm is catastrophically forgetting previously learned tasks when the agent faces a new one. Current rehearsal-based methods show their success in mitigating the catastrophic forgetting problem by replaying samples from previous tasks during learning a new one. However, these methods are infeasible when the data of previous tasks is not accessible. In this work, we propose a new pseudo-rehearsal-based …
Catastrophic forgetting (CF) happens whenever a neural network overwrites past knowledge while being trained on new tasks. Common techniques to handle CF include regularization of the weights (using, e.g., their importance on past tasks), and rehearsal strategies, where the network is constantly re-trained on past data. Generative models have also been applied for the latter, in order to have endless sources of data. In this paper, we propose a novel method that combines the strengths of regularization and generative-based rehearsal approaches. Our generative model consists of a normalizing fl…
HRL Laboratories（HRL实验室）；Information and Systems Sciences Laboratory（信息与系统科学实验室）；Center for Human Machine Collaboration（人机协作中心）
The utility of learning a dynamics/world model of the environment in reinforcement learning has been shown in a many ways. When using neural networks, however, these models suffer catastrophic forgetting when learned in a lifelong or continual fashion. Current solutions to the continual learning problem require experience to be segmented and labeled as discrete tasks, however, in continuous experience it is generally unclear what a sufficient segmentation of tasks would be. Here we propose a method to continually learn these internal world models through the interleaving of internally generate…
Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学）；Tooploox；Jagiellonian University（雅盖隆大学）
We introduce a neural network architecture that logarithmically reduces the number of self-rehearsal steps in the generative rehearsal of continually learned models. In continual learning (CL), training samples come in subsequent tasks, and the trained model can access only a single task at a time. To replay previous samples, contemporary CL methods bootstrap generative models and train them recursively with a combination of current and regenerated past data. This recurrence leads to superfluous computations as the same past samples are regenerated after each task, and the reconstruction quali…
DESIRE: Dynamic Knowledge Consolidation for Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning
Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学人工智能学院）；Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, HKISI-CAS（香港中文大学（深圳）人工智能与机器人中心（中国科学院深圳先进技术研究院））；Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago（芝加哥大学计算机科学系）
Consistent Prompting for Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning
School of Artificial Intelligence, Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学人工智能学院）；Cheng Kar-Shun Robotics Institute, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学郑家纯机器人研究院）；Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing, Ministry of Education（教育部机器智能与先进计算重点实验室）
The mainstream paradigm behind continual learning has been to adapt the model parameters to non-stationary data distributions, where catastrophic forgetting is the central challenge. Typical methods rely on a rehearsal buffer or known task identity at test time to retrieve learned knowledge and address forgetting, while this work presents a new paradigm for continual learning that aims to train a more succinct memory system without accessing task identity at test time. Our method learns to dynamically prompt (L2P) a pre-trained model to learn tasks sequentially under different task transitions…
The design of machines and algorithms capable of learning in a dynamically changing environment has become an increasingly topical problem with the increase of the size and heterogeneity of data available to learning systems. As a consequence, the key issue of Continual Learning has become that of addressing the stability-plasticity dilemma of connectionist systems, as they need to adapt their model without forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Within this context, rehearsal-based methods i.e., solutions in where the learner exploits memory to revisit past data, has proven to be very effec…
NavInfo Europe（四维图新欧洲）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）
Real-world applications often require learning continuously from a stream of data under ever-changing conditions. When trying to learn from such non-stationary data, deep neural networks (DNNs) undergo catastrophic forgetting of previously learned information. Among the common approaches to avoid catastrophic forgetting, rehearsal-based methods have proven effective. However, they are still prone to forgetting due to task-interference as all parameters respond to all tasks. To counter this, we take inspiration from sparse coding in the brain and introduce dynamic modularity and sparsity (Dynam…
Taming Modality Entanglement in Continual Audio-Visual Segmentation
School of Artificial Intelligence, UCAS（人工智能学院，UCAS）；MAIS, Institute of Automation（自动化研究所MAIS）；School of Intelligent Science and Technology, University of Science and Technolog Beijing（智能科学与技术学院，北京理工大学）
