Audio is a fundamental modality for analyzing speech, music, and environmental sounds. Although pretrained audio models have significantly advanced audio understanding, they remain fragile in real-world settings where data distributions shift over time. In this work, we present the first systematic benchmark for audio continual learning (CL) with pretrained models (PTMs), together with a comprehensive analysis of its unique challenges. Unlike in vision, where parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) has proven effective for CL, directly transferring such strategies to audio leads to poor performance. This stems from a fundamental property of audio backbones: they focus on low-level spectral details rather than structured semantics, causing severe upstream-downstream misalignment. Through extensive empirical study, we identify analytic classifiers with first-session adaptation (FSA) as a promising direction, but also reveal two major limitations: representation saturation in coarse-grained scenarios and representation drift in fine-grained scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose PACE, a novel method that enhances FSA via a regularized analytic classifier and enables multi-session adaptation through adaptive subspace-orthogonal PEFT for improved semantic alignment. In addition, we introduce spectrogram-based boundary-aware perturbations to mitigate representation overlap and improve stability. Experiments on six diverse audio CL benchmarks demonstrate that PACE substantially outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, marking an important step toward robust and scalable audio continual learning with PTMs.
Self-paced Weight Consolidation for Continual Learning
Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院沈阳自动化研究所）；Institutes for Robotics and Intelligent Manufacturing, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院机器人与智能制造创新研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
cAPM: Continual AI-Assisted Pace-Mapping with Active Learning
Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）；University of Utah（犹他大学）；Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, University of Utah（犹他大学科学计算与成像研究所）；Medical University of Graz（格拉茨医科大学）；University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine（宾夕法尼亚大学佩雷尔曼医学院）；The University of Arizona College of Medicine（亚利桑那大学医学院）；Dalhousie University（达尔豪斯大学）
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）；University of Moratuwa（莫拉图瓦大学）；Toyota Motor Europe（丰田汽车欧洲公司）
With the success of pretraining techniques in representation learning, a number of continual learning methods based on pretrained models have been proposed. Some of these methods design continual learning mechanisms on the pre-trained representations and only allow minimum updates or even no updates of the backbone models during the training of continual learning. In this paper, we question whether the complexity of these models is needed to achieve good performance by comparing them to a simple baseline that we designed. We argue that the pretrained feature extractor itself can be strong enou…
Subspace Optimization for Backpropagation-Free Continual Test-Time Adaptation
Poznan University of Technology（波兹南理工大学）；IDEAS NCBR；NASK - National Research Institute（NASK国家研究所）；Gdańsk University of Technology（格但斯克理工大学）；Graz University of Technology（格拉茨理工大学）
Pre-trained language models (LM) such as BERT, DistilBERT, and RoBERTa can be tuned for different domains (domain-tuning) by continuing the pre-training phase on a new target domain corpus. This simple domain tuning (SDT) technique has been widely used to create domain-tuned models such as BioBERT, SciBERT and ClinicalBERT. However, during the pretraining phase on the target domain, the LM models may catastrophically forget the patterns learned from their source domain. In this work, we study the effects of catastrophic forgetting on domain-tuned LM models and investigate methods that mitigate…
Boston University（波士顿大学）；MIT Lincoln Laboratory（麻省理工学院林肯实验室）
Domain Adaptation (DA) has received widespread attention from deep learning researchers in recent years because of its potential to improve test accuracy with out-of-distribution labeled data. Most state-of-the-art DA algorithms require an extensive amount of hyperparameter tuning and are computationally intensive due to the large batch sizes required. In this work, we propose a fast and simple DA method consisting of three stages: (1) domain alignment by covariance matching, (2) pseudo-labeling, and (3) ensembling. We call this method $\textbf{PACE}$, for $\textbf{P}$seudo-labels, $\textbf{A}…
Stability-Plasticity Balance via Singular-Vector Selection in LLM Continual Learning
School of Artificial Intelligence, Beihang University（北京航空航天大学人工智能学院）；Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Blockchain and Privacy Computing（未来区块链与隐私计算北京高精尖创新中心）；Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院计算技术研究所）
Training deep neural networks at the edge on light computational devices, embedded systems and robotic platforms is nowadays very challenging. Continual learning techniques, where complex models are incrementally trained on small batches of new data, can make the learning problem tractable even for CPU-only embedded devices enabling remarkable levels of adaptiveness and autonomy. However, a number of practical problems need to be solved: catastrophic forgetting before anything else. In this paper we introduce an original technique named "Latent Replay" where, instead of storing a portion of pa…
CI-CBM: Class-Incremental Concept Bottleneck Model for Interpretable Continual Learning
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校电气与计算机工程系）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校计算机科学与工程系）；Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校Halıcıoğlu数据科学研究所）
Few-Shot Continual Learning for 3D Brain MRI with Frozen Foundation Models
Independent Researcher, USA（美国独立研究者）；Indiana University at Bloomington, United States（印第安纳大学布卢明顿分校）；Independent Researcher, Taiwan（台湾独立研究者）；National Taiwan University, Taiwan（台湾国立大学）；Boise State University, United States（博伊西州立大学）；National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan（台湾阳明交通大学）
University of South Australia（南澳大学）；Johannes Kepler University（约翰内斯·开普勒大学）；Nantong University（南通大学）；University of Indonesia（印度尼西亚大学）
This paper proposes an assessor-guided learning strategy for continual learning where an assessor guides the learning process of a base learner by controlling the direction and pace of the learning process thus allowing an efficient learning of new environments while protecting against the catastrophic interference problem. The assessor is trained in a meta-learning manner with a meta-objective to boost the learning process of the base learner. It performs a soft-weighting mechanism of every sample accepting positive samples while rejecting negative samples. The training objective of a base le…
Learn it or Leave it: Module Composition and Pruning for Continual Learning
Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；LMU Munich（慕尼黑大学）；Hochschule der Medien（慕尼黑应用科技大学）；Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences（卡尔斯鲁厄应用科技大学）
In continual learning, model needs to continually learn a feature extractor and classifier on a sequence of tasks. This paper focuses on how to learn a classifier based on a pretrained feature extractor under continual learning setting. We present an probabilistic analysis that the failure of vanilla experience replay (ER) comes from unnecessary re-learning of previous tasks and incompetence to distinguish current task from the previous ones, which is the cause of knowledge degradation and prediction bias. To overcome these weaknesses, we propose a novel replay strategy task-aware experience r…
Brain-Inspired Hierarchical Modularity for General Continual Learning
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Tsinghua University（清华大学IDG/麦戈文脑科学研究院）；Tsinghua-Peking Center for Life Sciences（清华-北大生命科学联合中心）
Is Our Benchmark Enough? An Analysis of Continual Learning for MLLMs
School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin（都柏林圣三一学院计算机科学与统计学院）；Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学数学与计算机科学系）
Leveraging Hierarchical Taxonomies in Prompt-based Continual Learning
VinAI Research（VinAI研究院）；New York University（纽约大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；Hanoi University of Science and Technology（河内科技大学）；University of Oregon（俄勒冈大学）；The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）
In the field of Continual Learning, the objective is to learn several tasks one after the other without access to the data from previous tasks. Several solutions have been proposed to tackle this problem but they usually assume that the user knows which of the tasks to perform at test time on a particular sample, or rely on small samples from previous data and most of them suffer of a substantial drop in accuracy when updated with batches of only one class at a time. In this article, we propose a new method, OvA-INN, which is able to learn one class at a time and without storing any of the pre…
University of Southern California（南加州大学）；Information Sciences Institute（信息科学研究所）
We develop an algorithm for adapting a semantic segmentation model that is trained using a labeled source domain to generalize well in an unlabeled target domain. A similar problem has been studied extensively in the unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) literature, but existing UDA algorithms require access to both the source domain labeled data and the target domain unlabeled data for training a domain agnostic semantic segmentation model. Relaxing this constraint enables a user to adapt pretrained models to generalize in a target domain, without requiring access to source data. To this end, …
An Empirical Analysis of Forgetting in Pre-trained Models with Incremental Low-Rank Updates
Computer Vision Center, Spain（西班牙计算机视觉中心）；Department of Computer Science, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain（西班牙巴塞罗那自治大学计算机科学系）；Department of Information Engineering, University of Florence, Italy（意大利佛罗伦萨大学信息工程系）
