Continual Learning

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Overview

Continual Learning studies how models adapt to sequences of tasks or non-stationary data without losing useful earlier knowledge, a challenge known as catastrophic forgetting. Common approaches replay selected examples, regularize updates to protect important parameters, isolate tasks with adapters or separate subnetworks, or manage knowledge through prompts, memory, and model expansion. Methods are tested on class- and domain-incremental image benchmarks such as CIFAR and ImageNet, as well as task-free streams and applications in language, robotics, and healthcare. A central tension is balancing retention with the capacity to learn, while evaluations increasingly question assumptions such as known task boundaries and seek to measure transfer, recovery, resource use, and performance under realistic shifts.

Latest papers

CardsList

304 papers35 papers in the last four weeks, up 84% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. Adaptive Memory Crystallization for Autonomous AI Agent Learning in Dynamic Environments

    Apr 2, 2026Rajat Khanda, Mohammad Baqar, Sambuddha Chakrabarti +1Continual LearningMemory-Augmented Agents

    Supermicro San Jose, USA · Cisco Systems San Jose, USA · Princeton University New Jersey, USA +1

  2. Chameleons do not Forget: Prompt-Based Online Continual Learning for Next Activity Prediction

    Apr 1, 2026Marwan Hassani, Tamara Verbeek, Sjoerd van StratenNext-Action PredictionPredictive Process Monitoring

    Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands

  3. Temporal Memory for Resource-Constrained Agents: Continual Learning via Stochastic Compress-Add-Smooth

    Mar 31, 2026Michael ChertkovMemory CompressionContinual Learning

    Graduate Inter-Disciplinary Program in Applied Mathematics, & Department of Mathematics, University Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721

  4. Human-Like Lifelong Memory: A Neuroscience-Grounded Architecture for Infinite Interaction

    Mar 30, 2026Diego C. Lerma-TorresPersistent Memory for Language ModelsLong-Term Conversational Memory

    Universidad de Guanajuato

  5. Similarity-Aware Mixture-of-Experts for Data-Efficient Continual Learning

    Mar 24, 2026Connor Mclaughlin, Nigel Lee, Lili SuContinual LearningData-Efficient Learning

    Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA · The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

  6. Stochastic approximation in non-markovian environments revisited

    Mar 22, 2026Vivek Shripad BorkarStochastic ApproximationContinual Learning

    Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Powai, Mumbai 400076, INDIA.

  7. SLE-FNO: Single-Layer Extensions for Task-Agnostic Continual Learning in Fourier Neural Operators

    Mar 20, 2026Mahmoud Elhadidy, Roshan M. D'Souza, Amirhossein ArzaniContinual LearningFourier Neural Operator

    Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA · Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA · Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI, USA +1

  8. Continual Learning as Shared-Manifold Continuation Under Compatible Shift

    Mar 20, 2026Henry J. KobsContinual LearningGeometric Representation Learning

  9. Continual Learning for Food Category Classification Dataset: Enhancing Model Adaptability and Performance

    Mar 20, 2026Piyush Kaushik Bhattacharyya, Devansh Tomar, Shubham Mishra +6Continual LearningClass-Incremental Learning

    School of Computer Engineering, KIIT University, Bhubaneshwar, India

  10. Elastic Weight Consolidation Done Right for Continual Learning

    Mar 19, 2026Xuan Liu, Xiaobin ChangRegularization-Based Continual LearningContinual Learning

    School of Artificial Intelligence, Sun Yat-sen University, China · Key Laboratory of Intelligent Assessment Technology for Sustainable Tourism, Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Sun Yat-sen University · Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing, Ministry of Education, China

  11. CLeAN: Continual Learning Adaptive Normalization in Dynamic Environments

    Mar 18, 2026Isabella Marasco, Davide Evangelista, Elena Loli Piccolomini +1Continual LearningTabular ML

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering University of Bologna Bologna, 40126, Italy

  12. MedCL-Bench: Benchmarking stability-efficiency trade-offs and scaling in biomedical continual learning

    Mar 17, 2026Min Zeng, Shuang Zhou, Zaifu Zhan +1Continual LearningContinual Learning for LLMs

    Division of Computational Health Sciences, Department of Surgery, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 55455, MN, USA.

  13. MAND: Modality-Aware Novelty Detection for Open-World Egocentric Activity Recognition

    Mar 17, 2026Hyejeong Im, Wonseon Lim, Dae-Won KimContinual LearningEgocentric Video Understanding

    Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chung-Ang University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.

  14. The Metric Slingshot: Navigational Reuse as Width-Optimal Structural Decoupling in Continual Learning

    Mar 16, 2026Xin LiNeural ProcessesContinual Learning

    Department of Computer Science University at Albany, SUNY Albany, NY 12222, USA

  15. A Self-Evolving Defect Detection Framework for Industrial Photovoltaic Systems

    Mar 16, 2026Haoyu He, Yu Duan, Wenzhen Liu +5Fault DetectionIndustrial Inspection

    EcoFlow Inc, Shenzhen, China · School of Electrical Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China

  16. A Lightweight, Transferable, and Self-Adaptive Framework for Intelligent DC Arc-Fault Detection in Photovoltaic Systems

    Mar 16, 2026Xiaoke Yang, Long Gao, Haoyu He +5Fault DetectionPower Systems

    EcoFlow Inc, Shenzhen, China. · AAU Energy, Aalborg University, Denmark

  17. Continual Few-shot Adaptation for Synthetic Fingerprint Detection

    Mar 15, 2026Joseph Geo Benjamin, Anil K. Jain, Karthik NandakumarFingerprint IdentificationBiometric Identification

    Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI, USA

  18. Unlearning-based sliding window for continual learning under concept drift

    Mar 15, 2026Michal Wozniak, Marek Klonowski, Maciej Maczynski +1Task-Free Continual LearningConcept Drift

    Wroclaw University of Science and Technology Wrocław, Poland · Rochester Institute of Technology NY, USA

  19. Residual SODAP: Residual Self-Organizing Domain-Adaptive Prompting with Structural Knowledge Preservation for Continual Learning

    Mar 13, 2026Gyutae Oh, Jungwoo Bae, Jitae ShinContinual LearningDomain-Incremental Learning

    Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University, Suwon 16419, Republic of Korea

  20. Continual Learning with Vision-Language Models via Semantic-Geometry Preservation

    Mar 12, 2026Chiyuan He, Zihuan Qiu, Fanman Meng +4Continual LearningContinual Learning for VLMs

    School of Information and Communication Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China

  21. Representation Finetuning for Continual Learning

    Mar 11, 2026Haihua Luo, Xuming Ran, Tommi Kärkkäinen +4Continual LearningFine-Tuning

    Faculty of Information Technology, University of Jyväskylä, Jyväskylä, Finland · National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore · School of Computer Science and Technology, Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China

  22. One Adapter for All: Towards Unified Representation in Step-Imbalanced Class-Incremental Learning

    Mar 10, 2026Xiaoyan Zhang, Jiangpeng HeAdapter-Based Continual LearningClass-Incremental Learning

    University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A · Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, U.S.A

  23. LCA: Local Classifier Alignment for Continual Learning

    Mar 10, 2026Tung Tran, Danilo Vasconcellos Vargas, Khoat ThanContinual LearningIncremental Learning

    Kyushu University, Fukuoka, Japan · Hanoi University of Science and Technology, Hanoi, Vietnam

  24. Can You Hear, Localize, and Segment Continually? An Exemplar-Free Continual Learning Benchmark for Audio-Visual Segmentation

    Mar 9, 2026Siddeshwar Raghavan, Gautham Vinod, Bruce Coburn +1Audio-Visual UnderstandingContinual Learning

    Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN 47906, USA

  25. Don't Look Back in Anger: MAGIC Net for Streaming Continual Learning with Temporal Dependence

    Mar 9, 2026Federico Giannini, Sandro D'Andrea, Emanuele Della ValleContinual LearningOnline Continual Learning

    DEIB - Politecnico di Milano

  26. HY-WU (Part I): An Extensible Functional Neural Memory Framework and An Instantiation in Text-Guided Image Editing

    Mar 7, 2026Mengxuan Wu, Xuanlei Zhao, Ziqiao Wang +3Memory-Augmented Neural NetworksContinual Learning

  27. CLoPA: Continual Low Parameter Adaptation of Interactive Segmentation for Medical Image Annotation

    Mar 6, 2026Parhom Esmaeili, Chayanin Tangwiriyasakul, Eli Gibson +2Medical Image SegmentationInteractive Medical Image Segmentation

    School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences, KCL, UK · Siemens Healthineers, Princeton NJ, USA

  28. Streaming Continual Learning for Unified Adaptive Intelligence in Dynamic Environments

    Mar 2, 2026Federico Giannini, Giacomo Ziffer, Andrea Cossu +1Continual LearningOnline Continual Learning

    DEIB, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, 20133, Italy · Computer Science Department, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

  29. A Practical Guide to Streaming Continual Learning

    Mar 2, 2026Andrea Cossu, Federico Giannini, Giacomo Ziffer +5Continual LearningStreaming Algorithms

    Computer Science Department, University of Pisa, Largo Bruno Pontecorvo, 3, Pisa, 56127, Italy · DEIB, Politecnico di Milano, Via Giuseppe Ponzio, 34, Milano, 20133, Italy · Motus ml, Milano, Italy +2

  30. DynaTokens: Controlling Token Dynamics for Continual Video-Language Understanding

    Mar 2, 2026Toan Nguyen, Yang Liu, Celso De Melo +1Continual LearningVideo QA

    School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Australia · DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory, USA