Incremental Learning

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13 papers in the last four weeks, up 63% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 103

Oct 6, 2026cs.AI

CoDe-LoRA: Mitigating the Orthogonality Dilemma in Continual Learning of LLMs via Knowledge Consolidation and Decoupling

Continual learning (CL) is essential for Large Language Models (LLMs) to sequentially adapt to evolving tasks. To mitigate catastrophic forgetting, recent advances implement low-rank adaptation with orthogonal projections (e.g., O-LoRA) to isolate task parameters. However, we reveal that such strict geometric constraints trigger an "Orthogonality Dilemma": rigid parameter isolation impedes the transfer and accumulation of shared representations across semantically related tasks. In this work, we propose a new replay-free method, called Consolidation and Decoupling LoRA (CoDe-LoRA), for CL of LLMs. CoDe-LoRA disentangles the learning process into Consolidating Universal Knowledge and Decoupling Task-Specific Knowledge. To achieve this, CoDe-LoRA leverages an adaptive null space projection mechanism and semantic routing to balance knowledge accumulation with task-specific adaptation. Experimental results across four backbones and three CL benchmarks show that CoDe-LoRA achieves the best average accuracy. Our code is available at https://github.com/Estrellajer/CoDe-LoRA.

Maoqi Liu, Quan Fang, Yufei He

Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications · National University of Singapore

Continual Learning for LLMs Low-Rank Adaptation Incremental Learning Catastrophic Forgetting

Oct 5, 2026cs.LG

HiER-BLS: A Hierarchy-Guided and Error-Correcting Robust Incremental Broad Learning System

Broad Learning System (BLS) supports analytical training and incremental expansion, but its growth needs guidance on which inputs new blocks should learn from. Weight errors pose a further challenge by displacing learned outputs across class boundaries. We propose HiER-BLS to couple hierarchy-guided representation growth with error-correcting learning. Successive blocks focus on inputs selected by feature importance and correlation while preserving earlier representations. The evolving branch guides encoded learners through subspace size and sample confidence, so its learning experience informs both their feature views and supervision. For finite broad readouts, we show how codeword correlations transform fitted class scores. Prediction preservation depends on the distance from the actual output to the nearest decoding boundary relative to the model's sensitivity to weight errors. Experiments on five image and five tabular datasets demonstrate improved classification performance over representative BLS variants. Component studies show that hierarchy guidance benefits the encoded branch even when the guiding branch has lower standalone accuracy, with further gains from combining their scores. Longer codes continue to improve accuracy under stronger Gaussian weight errors after clean accuracy has largely saturated.

Gongli Zhang, C. L. Philip Chen, Zhulin Liu

Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Computational AI Models and Cognitive Intelligence, the School of Computer Science and Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510006, China, also with the Pazhou Lab, Guangzhou 510335, China, and also with the Engineering Research Center of the Ministry of Education on Health Intelligent Perception and Paralleled Digital-Human, Guangzhou 510641, China

Hierarchical Representation Learning Neural Network Robustness Incremental Learning

Sep 29, 2026cs.LG

Width Expansion as a Method for Class Incremental Learning

Class Incremental Learning (Class-IL) requires models to learn new classes over time while preserving previously acquired knowledge without access to past data or task identity. This setting intensifies the stability-plasticity dilemma and makes catastrophic forgetting a central challenge. Existing approaches include regularization, knowledge distillation, replay, and architectural expansion. However, many expansion methods rely on explicit task identifiers or predefined growth strategies, limiting their applicability when task boundaries are unavailable at inference time. This work proposes a dynamic width expansion method that increases the number of neurons within existing layers according to a normalized loss criterion, without requiring task-specific information. An attention mechanism with persistent key-value memory is also incorporated to stabilize feature representations and reduce interference between previously learned and newly introduced classes. The approach is evaluated on Split MNIST and Split CIFAR-100 under the standard Class-IL protocol. Experiments compare fixed-capacity and dynamically expanding architectures, both with and without attention, combined with established continual learning methods including EWC, LwF, and A-GEM. Results show that progressive width expansion consistently improves performance over fixed architectures, particularly when combined with functional methods and A-GEM. The combination of width expansion and attention provides the most consistent gains. Overall, dynamic width expansion based on representational demand provides an effective and flexible strategy for Class-IL, although uncontrolled growth may increase overfitting and computational cost.

A. L. S. Conde, Y. Elkhatib, C. M. Ranieri

Institute of Geosciences and Exact Sciences, São Paulo State University (UNESP), Av. 24-A, 1515, Rio Claro, 13506-692, SP, Brazil · School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, Scotland, United Kingdom

Class-Incremental Learning Dynamic Neural Networks Incremental Learning

Sep 29, 2026cs.SD

Learning as Deepfakes Evolve: RF-Prompt for Continual Audio Deepfake Detection

Continual audio deepfake detection requires learning newly emerging deepfake methods while retaining discrimination of previously encountered speech. Existing dataset-incremental evaluation changes both real-speech domains and deepfake mechanisms, making their effects difficult to distinguish. We construct five task organizations over identical training, development, and evaluation pools to study these factors under a controlled sample budget. Our proposed Real-Anchored Mechanism-Incremental (RAMI) protocol reflects the practical setting in which available real speech provides a recurring mixed-domain reference while new deepfake mechanisms arrive incrementally. We further propose RF-Prompt, an asymmetric continual prompt-learning method that preserves reusable real-speech knowledge through a shared real prompt and expands mechanism-specific knowledge through inherited fake experts with orthogonal residuals. Input-adaptive soft fusion combines the accumulated experts into a fixed number of injected tokens without requiring task identity at inference. On RAMI, RF-Prompt achieves 10.110% average EER and 10.370% pooled EER, outperforming all evaluated continual-learning baselines. Across the five controlled protocols, RAMI yields the lowest common-average and pooled EER. Component ablations, limited-data experiments, and cross-backbone evaluations further validate the proposed design.

Yuankun Xie, Xiaoxuan Guo, Xiaopeng Wang +3

The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China · Communication University of China, Beijing, China · Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China

Audio Deepfake Detection Prompt Learning Incremental Learning

Sep 28, 2026cs.LG

Normative Loss Landscape Navigation: A Trajectory-Based Approach to Mitigating Forgetting in Incremental Learning

Continual learning models suffer from catastrophic forgetting when trained sequentially on non-stationary data distributions. Previously, this has been addressed through weight regularization. While preconditioning gradients offer a promising alternative to mitigate forgetting, current approaches are myopic. Conversely, standard regularization methods apply rigid, scalar Euclidean penalties that entirely ignore the underlying Riemannian geometry of the parameter space. To overcome this gap, we propose TMLN (Trajectory-Modulatory Landscape Navigation), a normative navigation policy that formalizes continual learning as an optimal control problem over a curved loss landscape. TMLN utilizes a memory-efficient diagonal empirical Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) to define a localized Riemannian manifold. To compensate for the spatial limitations of the diagonal approximation, TMLN dynamically modulates a preconditioner using the normalized historical trajectory of the network's parameter values. By integrating this trajectory-based preconditioning directly into the gradient update, we actively shield historically critical parameter directions without relying on additive penalties. Empirical evaluations on class- and domain-incremental benchmarks demonstrate that our method significantly reduces the loss barrier between consecutive tasks.

Isabelle Aguilar, Zayn Andre Zainal, Luis Fernando Herbozo Contreras +2

Class-Incremental Learning Incremental Learning Catastrophic Forgetting

Sep 27, 2026cs.CV

Re:Cognize -- Open-Set Comic Character Re-Identification

A manga reader meets a character on one page and knows them on sight a hundred pages later, without ever being handed a cast list. Re-identifying comic characters demands the same, open-set and sequential: pages arrive as a stream in reading order, new faces appear before anyone names them, and the cast is assembled as the story is read.

\textbf{Re:Cognize}

evaluates recognition as the story is read, not against a cast handed over in advance: four protocols on one query stream, from closed-set retrieval to a cast the model must build and grow itself. The surprise is where models fail. Recognising is close to solved: one reference image per character already ranks as well as a gallery built in advance. Knowing what to believe is not: a model that adds its own matches makes its cast worse, while the same growth with correct labels would gain over twenty points of top-1 accuracy. The bottleneck is acceptance, not vision, and one comparison decides it: an addition pays exactly when it is right more often than the cast already was on the queries it takes over. The comparison has nothing to fit, and measured on half of a new corpus it calls the other half correctly.

\textbf{ReCast}

puts it to work with nothing fitted on data: a cast sheet of one running average per character, grown only where the page itself vouches for a crop. It recovers a third to two thirds of what perfect labels would, depending on whether the cast starts from random examples or from first appearances. Re:Cognize measures whether a model can read along; ReCast is a cast that does. Our claims are on identity maintenance, recognising characters already met; the emergence of new ones is measured as a diagnostic under a fixed reference rule, and we propose no method for it.

Aaditya Baranwal, Madhav Kataria, Yogesh S Rawat +1

Institute of Artificial Intelligence, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL, USA · University of Central Florida

Self-Training Open-Set Recognition Incremental Learning Person Re-Identification

Sep 22, 2026cs.LG

A Lightweight Plastic-Memory Framework for Graph Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning

Graph Incremental Learning has garnered increasing attention as dynamic graph data continues to emerge across diverse fields. Conventional approaches primarily address catastrophic forgetting by preserving node-related knowledge through replay or distillation techniques; however, they often incur high computational costs and inefficiency. This issue is further exacerbated in real-world scenarios where labeled data for new classes is scarce. In this paper, we propose a novel lightweight plastic-memory framework specifically designed for few-shot incremental learning on graphs. The core idea of our framework is the construction of a plastic-memory module that evolves over time, continuously updating and expanding its memory to accommodate new classes while retaining previously learned knowledge. In contrast to existing techniques, our memory module is both lightweight and effective, featuring an innovative evolving micro-clustering structure that dynamically updates representations of class prototypes, sub-prototypes, and their interaction weights. Building on this memory module, we introduce a memory-driven meta-learning framework that enhances adaptability to new tasks in its inner loop while maintaining stability for earlier tasks in the outer loop. Extensive experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate the framework's superior performance in balancing stability for old knowledge and adaptability to new knowledge.

Zihan Mei, Zhili Qin, Tongze Zhang +3

University of Electronic Science and Technology of China

Class-Incremental Learning Few-Shot Learning Incremental Learning

Sep 21, 2026cs.LG

Lightweight Ranking Heads: Accelerating Multi-Task Experimentation in Production Recommender Systems

Modern production-scale recommender systems rely on complex, multi-task ranking models. Introducing new prediction tasks into these massive systems often causes bottlenecks - it risks negative task conflicts with existing tasks, and can lead to long development and experimentation cycles due to the expensive retraining of backbone models and downstream models or tuning of reward combination formulas. To address the critical challenge of slow experimentation velocity, we introduce the Lightweight Ranking Heads (Light Heads) framework. Designed for continuous online learning environments, Light Heads enable the dynamic injection of new tasks into existing multi-task ranking models, effectively obviating the need for model cold-starting and retraining of backbone models. By utilizing stop-gradients and stateless daily training, this design strictly isolates new tasks, mitigating the risk of adverse task conflicts. Crucially, this framework uses a centralized configuration that allows Light Heads to be added to multiple models simultaneously, unblocking faster training data generation and co-training of downstream models. Successfully deployed at YouTube scale, this approach reduces the iteration cycle for multi-task experimentation from several weeks to days. In this paper, we detail the system architecture, analyze the training dynamics of stateless cold-started heads, compare their performance to full heads, and demonstrate how Light Heads have enabled the rapid A/B experimentation and deployment of new ranking tasks that yield measurable production value.

Sanjay Surendranath Girija, Aniruddh Nath, Li Wei +6

Google LLC Mountain View, CA, USA

Learning to Rank Multi-Task Learning Recommender Systems Incremental Learning

Sep 21, 2026cs.LG

Muon Can Outperform Dedicated Continual Learning Methods

Continual learning with Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA) typically mitigates forgetting by penalizing the overlap between a new update and the accumulated past weights, which discourages certain update directions without controlling how an update distributes its energy over the ones that remain. We ask whether that restriction has to be task-aware, or whether a generic one supplied by the optimizer is enough. We train a plain incremental LoRA (IncLoRA) with Muon, which orthogonalizes each update, and compare it against O-LoRA and ELLA over five seeds and three task orders on the Standard CL Benchmark and three seeds on TRACE. IncLoRA+Muon reaches the accuracy band of the dedicated methods on Standard CL and improves on every AdamW configuration on TRACE. One update-constraining mechanism is enough, whether it comes from the loss or from the optimizer; on Standard CL a second one does not help, and for the most restrictive method it costs 8.4 points of accuracy and the plasticity to fit each task. What separates the two optimizers is not the size of the update, which under Muon is 0.91 to 2.06 times that under AdamW, but how it is distributed. AdamW confines it to between 1.4 and 1.8 effective singular directions, Muon spreads it over 7.0, and the two do not overlap in any tracked run. Part of the advantage usually attributed to dedicated CL methods may therefore be explained by the geometry of the optimizer's updates.

Sebastian George Sincari, Bogdan Alexandru Gheorghe, Antonio Barbalau

Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania · Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science University of Bucharest Bucharest, Romania · Bitdefender, Bucharest, Romania +1

Continual Learning Muon Optimizer Low-Rank Adaptation Incremental Learning

Sep 21, 2026cs.CV

MECAIL: Communication-Aware Incremental Learning for Object Detection with 14.6 KB Spatiotemporal Experts

Intelligent transportation systems require Incremental Learning (IL) to continually improve their overall performance in dynamic environments. However, most edge devices lack the computational resources to support on-device IL, requiring updates to be transmitted from centralized servers. We propose using this setup to obtain dense, specialized module coverage that adapts a fixed base model to specific spatiotemporal contexts, such as parking lots, gas stations, ferries, or construction sites. However, in order to reliably transmit these modules to the edge device, using TCP, UDP, and BTP over V2X, Wi-Fi, and 2G-5G hardware, we establish a strict limit of 14.6 KB per module to fit within the first TCP window and to minimize UDP/BTP fragmentation. We further introduce Mixture-of-Experts for Communication-Aware Incremental Learning (MECAIL), the first method that meets this strict requirement, in which each new domain or environment is served by a small expert network that adapts the base model. We validate MECAIL on D-RICO and ODinW-13, where it largely matches the performance of parameter-heavy approaches while enabling practical, bandwidth-efficient large-scale deployment. This allows comprehensive coverage by experts for highly specific, focused, and temporary situations.

Matthias Neuwirth-Trapp, Maarten Bieshaar, Danda Paudel +3

ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. · Bosch Research, Hildesheim, Germany. · INSAIT, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Sofia, Bulgaria.

Intelligent Transportation Systems Mixture of Experts Domain-Incremental Learning Object Detection Incremental Learning

Sep 15, 2026cs.LG

Uncertainty-Aware Continual Learning for Open-World Intent Discovery Under an evolving Label Space

Real-world intelligent systems increasingly operate under open-world conditions, where user intents are not fixed or exhaustively known a priori and may evolve as new interaction patterns emerge. This paper proposes a unified uncertainty-aware probabilistic framework for continual new intent discovery under an evolving label space. Each utterance is encoded through an adaptive

β

-VAE into a latent mean, used for classification and density modelling and a posterior uncertainty estimate acting as a global reliability signal. Classifier confidence, posterior uncertainty and DP-GMM likelihood are combined through a multi-signal decision mechanism to distinguish known intents from potentially novel samples. Candidate novel instances are clustered through a density-based discovery module and only reliable clusters are promoted to new labels, enabling controlled label-space expansion. Replay and Elastic Weight Consolidation mitigate catastrophic forgetting and preserve previously acquired knowledge. The paper formalises continual intent discovery as a structured multi-phase open-world problem, introduces adaptive label-space expansion under stability--plasticity constraints and uses posterior uncertainty to regulate trusted-sample selection, pseudo-labelling, novelty admission and replay. Experiments show high novelty precision, stable adaptation across sequential phases and limited forgetting. Near-zero NMI and ARI indicate limited reconstruction of the complete fine-grained intent taxonomy, consistent with the framework's conservative promotion strategy. Qualitative analyses nevertheless reveal dense and locally coherent semantic clusters, showing that reliable novel structures can be discovered without exhaustive recovery of the underlying taxonomy.

Pisante Aida, Formentin Simone

Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy.

Continual Learning Incremental Learning

Sep 15, 2026cs.LG

CLARE: Scalable Class-Incremental Continual Learning via a Sparsity-Based Framework

Continual learning must balance the learning of new knowledge with the retention of previously learned knowledge to incrementally learn tasks from a data stream without catastrophic forgetting. While leveraging pretrained models has significantly advanced continual learning, existing methods exhibit a scalability bottleneck when trained sequentially on many tasks, suffering from performance degradation due to inter-task interference and loss of plasticity. Inspired by evidence that sparse fine-tuning achieves performance comparable to full fine-tuning, this paper presents a novel sparsity-driven continual learning framework. Our continual learning method, termed CLARE, operates in two stages: it first identifies a sparse, task-critical parameter mask via a sparsity-inducing objective, then performs mask-constrained fine-tuning by only optimizing parameters selected by the mask. This two-stage sparse adapter mechanism enables all tasks to be accumulated within a shared adapter space while reducing destructive interference across tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate the scalability of CLARE. On the long task-sequence benchmark Omnibenchmark-1k, CLARE outperforms strong baselines in final accuracy by a large margin, e.g, improving EASE by 4.64% and 13.34% after learning 100 tasks, respectively.

Yunxiang Fu, Meng Lou, Zicheng Liao +1

School of Computing and Data Science, The University of Hong Kong · Hong Kong Generative AI Research and Development Center

Class-Incremental Learning Continual Learning Sparse Fine-Tuning Incremental Learning Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Sep 12, 2026eess.AS

Investigating catastrophic forgetting in sound event classification

This work investigates a number of approaches to prevent catastrophic forgetting in class incremental learning scenarios for sound event classification tasks. We analyze the problem using architectural and regularization approaches, using FSD50K and AudioSet datasets. We design incremental stages and solutions that selectively protect the kernels of the network from weight updates to prevent catastrophic forgetting, and a dynamic head solution that expands itself each time a new task is learned. The findings show that catastrophic forgetting mainly happens in deeper layers, in particular in the classifier head. For the studied in-domain sound classification problem, the solution that seems to alleviate catastrophic forgetting and is the most efficient is a full freezing of the feature extractor with a fine-tuning of the dynamic head classifier, showing little to no forgetting and great training stability, and a good balance between memory-stability and learning plasticity.

Riccardo Casciotti, Annamaria Mesaros

Signal Processing Research Center Tampere University Tampere, Finland

Class-Incremental Learning Incremental Learning Audio Classification Catastrophic Forgetting

Sep 11, 2026cs.LG

Learning Orthogonal Multi-Index Models Beyond Small Initialization: Incremental Learning, Competitive Dynamics and Symmetry

Recent work has identified incremental learning in shallow networks trained on single-index and multi-index models. However, existing analyses often rely on simplifying settings, such as small initialization, correlation loss, or layer-wise training. These choices reduce neuron interactions and leave some feature learning dynamics under standard initialization unexplored. We study training dynamics for polynomial-width two-layer networks learning orthogonal multi-index targets under standard initialization using polynomially many samples. We first prove that incremental learning still occurs: the loss decreases sequentially according to the Hermite expansion of the target, with lower-order components learned before higher-order components recover the individual target directions. In this standard initialization regime, training also shows a competitive reallocation of parameter mass: after the total mass fits the target mean and stabilizes, mass shifts into the target subspace and then concentrates on aligned neurons. Our theoretical analysis uses slightly modified gradient flow, while vanilla gradient descent empirically exhibits the same qualitative dynamics. Technically, we introduce a symmetry-based finite-width approximation via symmetrized networks, rather than comparing directly with an infinite-width limit. This yields better control of approximation errors and may be of independent interest.

Mo Zhou, Weihang Xu, Simon S. Du +1

University of Washington · Amazon, Inc.

Shallow Neural Networks Orthogonal Representation Learning Incremental Learning Neural Network Training Dynamics Multi-Index Models

Sep 10, 2026cs.CV

Hyperbolic Geometry for Open-World Object Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery

Open-world object detection (OWOD) extends closed-set detection by requiring models to identify unknown objects and incrementally learn them once annotations become available. In remote sensing imagery, object categories often exhibit latent hierarchical relationships that may be inadequately represented in the Euclidean spaces commonly adopted by existing methods, limiting unknown-object recall and incremental-learning performance. To address this issue, we investigate hyperbolic geometry for OWOD in remote sensing imagery and propose HyRS-OWOD. To improve unknown object recall, we design a two-step unknown-object discovery mechanism: a Decoupled Objectness Learning (DOL) module that disentangles foreground perception from semantic information to separate foreground proposals from background regions, followed by a Hyperbolic Uncertainty Learning (HUL) component that leverages the radius of hyperbolic embeddings as an uncertainty-aware cue for known-unknown discrimination. For incremental learning, we develop a Hyperbolic Metric Learning (HML) strategy that enhances inter-class separability, facilitating the incorporation of novel categories while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Experiments on three remote sensing benchmarks demonstrate consistent improvements in unknown recall and incremental learning over state-of-the-art OWOD methods.

Wuzhou Li, Jiawei Zhou, Shenghang Wang +1

School of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan Textile University, Wuhan 430072, China · Electronic Information School, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China · Electrical and Computer Engineering, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA +1

Open-Vocabulary Object Detection Continual Learning Incremental Learning Aerial Object Detection Hyperbolic Representation Learning

Sep 3, 2026cs.LG

Local Updates, Global Learning (LUGL): Playing Games with non-incremental Learners

The dominance of Neural Networks (NNs) in RL is partially due to their incremental learning capability, which naturally suits the online, non-stationary nature of self-play training. However, gradient-boosted trees like LightGBM are widely recognised as the state of the art for tabular data in supervised learning, often outperforming NNs in accuracy and efficiency. Game states are inherently tabular---discrete actions, categorical card identities, structured board positions---which makes them an ideal candidate for tree-based methods. We introduce LUGL (Local Updates, Global Learning), a framework that decouples data collection from model fitting, enabling non-incremental learners such as GBTs to operate in RL settings where they would otherwise fail due to distributional shift. LUGL alternates between a local updates phase, where the agent plays self-play games and accumulates tabular updates (Q-values, V-values, policies, or regret values) in a finite table, and a global learning phase, where the table is used to train a function approximator that generalises to unseen states before the table is reset. We test our approach in four standard perfect-information games (Tic-tac-toe, Connect-4, Othello, and Hex) and five imperfect-information games (Kuhn's poker, Leduc Hold'em, Liar's Dice, Goofspiel, and Flop5 Hold'em), and show that our results are competitive with or superior to DQN and DeepCFR. Our experiments demonstrate that the community's strong bias towards NNs in game-playing may be unwarranted, since LightGBM-based agents achieve competitive or superior performance across all tested benchmarks.

David Milec, Spyridon Samothrakis, Michael Fairbank +1

Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic · School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom · Maastricht University, the Netherlands

Gradient-Boosted Decision Trees Game-Playing Agents Self-Play RL Incremental Learning

Sep 1, 2026physics.ao-ph

A Sensor-Adaptive Incremental Learning Framework for Artifact Detection in Satellite Precipitation Data

Historically, retrieving rainfall data from satellite imagery has been the domain of space agencies. However, in recent years, the development of cheaper, more compact satellites (SmallSats) capable of detecting rainfall proxies has led to a significant increase in private-sector initiatives for satellite launch and surface precipitation products. This rapid growth has yet to be matched by data validation efforts. Consequently, the need for a robust tool to detect anomalies in near-real-time data before it is disseminated to the public has become critical. In this paper, we present the development of an anomaly-detection system to identify artifacts in global satellite-based rainfall products. The developed framework leverages pre-trained computer vision models and incorporates scarce human-labeled data to detect specific anomalies. Our proposed anomaly detection strategy is tested on data from the Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSMI) and the Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder (SSMIS). Results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach at separating regular orbits from artifact-containing orbits for each satellite, with performance comparable to state-of-the-art in-place methods. Additionally, the framework offers explainability and the capacity for iterative refinement following false-positive or false-negative classifications.

Andres F. Monsalve, Hernan A. Moreno, Christian D. Kummerow

University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso, TX, USA · Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO, USA

Remote Sensing Incremental Learning Anomaly Detection

Aug 31, 2026cs.CV

One Adapter, Many Tasks: Task-Conditioned Feature Transformations for Continual Learning

Class-incremental learning (CIL) requires a model to incrementally learn tasks that contain new classes without accessing earlier training data while preserving the ability to recognize all seen classes. Recently, pretrained-model-based approaches have become prevalent by adapting a frozen backbone with additional lightweight trainable modules. Existing methods, however, exhibit limitations: task-specific adapters learn explicit per-task representations but are parameter- and computation-inefficient, while LoRA-based merging methods combine per-task LoRA parameters into a single model whose static aggregated weights cause representation interference during inference. To address these problems, we present \textbf{FACET}: task-conditioned \textbf{F}e\textbf{A}ture transformation with \textbf{C}ondition\textbf{E}d feature consis\textbf{T}ency, achieving excellent parameter efficiency while producing highly discriminative features during inference. When continually trained on a task sequence, FACET learns a single shared adapter that employs a dynamic task-conditioned feature transformation, shaping the overall feature distribution of the adapter into a mixture of overlap-reduced task-specific components. On the other hand, we propose an efficient replay-free task-conditioned feature consistency loss, aiming to mitigate catastrophic forgetting of the learned mixture distribution in the adapter's feature space. Even when maintaining only a single adapter, FACET demonstrates robust scalability. On both very long task sequences (e.g., 200 tasks) and standard short task sequences (e.g., 20 tasks), our method achieves superior performance while using significantly fewer trainable parameters and GFLOPs. The code will be made open source upon acceptance.

Yunxiang Fu, Meng Lou, Yizhou Yu

School of Computing and Data Science The University of Hong Kong

Class-Incremental Learning Incremental Learning Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning

Aug 31, 2026cs.CV

Knowing Beyond the Known: Reinforced Knowledge Specification for Multi-Label Class-Incremental Learning

Existing class-incremental learning methods struggle in multi-label scenarios (MLCIL) due to the inherent contradiction of learning objectives arising from co-occurring and incomplete labels. We argue that the core obstacle is the model's ambiguous boundary between known and unknown knowledge, which undermines historical knowledge retention, complicates current task learning, and limits adaptability to future concepts. To address this, we propose KBK (Knowing Beyond the Known), a reinforced knowledge specification framework that explicitly models what is known or not to unify historical, current, and prospective learning. Specifically, to clarify known knowledge, we develop a hierarchical feature purification module that disentangles fine-grained class-specific features from global features, where high-level semantic abstraction is reinforced with low-level visual features. Additionally, an uncertainty-aware recall enhancement strategy suppresses unreliable predictions based on distribution priors, improving the quality of historical recall. For probing the unknown, KBK leverages semantic correlations to synthesize informative unknown features under co-occurring, preserving embedding space for future learning. Furthermore, to mitigate heterogeneous forgetting, we design a category-balanced gradient compensation loss that dynamically reweights gradient backpropagation according to forgetting speeds. Experiments on multiple benchmarks validate the effectiveness and robustness of KBK, which surpasses prior best methods by 2.7% in Avg. Acc on MS-COCO B0-C10 setting even without any replay buffers.

Aoting Zhang, Dongbao Yang, Chang Liu +3

Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of2026 Sciences, Beijing, 100085, China · School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy ofAug Sciences, Beijing, 101408, China · Nankai University, Tianjin, 300350, China +1

Class-Incremental Learning Multi-Label Classification Incremental Learning

Aug 21, 2026cs.LG

In-Cell Learning: Language Models That Update Their Own Weights in Sequence Without Changing the File They Ship

A 4-bit quantized weight specifies a rounding cell rather than a single full-precision value. We introduce in-cell learning, a paradigm for writing new knowledge only within these cells, so that re-quantizing the served weights reproduces the released integer codes and scales exactly. CellFill implements this idea with bounded trainable positions inside frozen quantization cells and ships the update as a separate, subtractively revocable file. Across published NF4 and W4A16 releases of Qwen3 and Gemma from 1.7B to 32B parameters, CellFill writes 83-99% of a real-fact corpus while returning the stored code on every constrained weight. The injected facts generalize to paraphrases and composition, and answer 78-88% of selected PopQA questions that the released model misses. Sequential experiments show that rehearsal preserves earlier knowledge, whereas available room and new-task plasticity decline across updates. Consolidation re-quantizes the learned weights to produce a declared major version, restoring room at a measured capability cost. A six-task write-rehearse-consolidate cycle retains at least 92.8% of first learning in two 8B runs and records zero code violations over 6.9 billion constrained weights at every fold. These results define a version-management protocol in which minor updates preserve the released quantized artifact bitwise and major updates are explicit, measurable, and verifiable.

Zifeng Liu, Yaxin Lu, Xuanhan Wu +6

Big Data and Artificial Intelligence Center, The Third Affiliated Hospital of Sun Yat-sen University · Institute for Frontier Interdisciplinary Research in Health Sciences and Technology, Sun Yat-sen University · Sun Yat-sen University Institute of Artificial Intelligence +7

LLM Quantization Knowledge Editing Continual Learning for LLMs Incremental Learning

Aug 13, 2026cs.AI

Uniform Herding: Exemplar Replay with Representation Refresh

As the feature representation changes, replay must preserve the earlier classes. However, only a bounded active exemplar set can be replayed. We propose Uniform Herding, which allocates the current active set across observed classes and uses a bounded candidate pool to refresh their chosen exemplars in the current representation. On CIFAR-100 with ten class-incremental tasks, a ResNet-18 backbone, active budget

M=2{,}000

, retrieval budget

b=64

, and three seeds, Uniform Herding obtains

44.00\pm0.51\%

final average accuracy and

17.22\pm0.43\%

forgetting, compared with

42.33\pm1.20\%

and

24.87\pm1.11\%

for iCaRL. Within the Uniform Herding protocol, final accuracy decreased when NME or herding was replaced with the tested alternatives, while forgetting increased when distillation was removed. Changing the retrieval budget has a smaller effect across the tested range than changing the active budget. The comparison with iCaRL is end-to-end. It does not isolate the effect of refresh from the other protocol differences. These results are limited to the tested protocol.

Krishna Subedi

Neryva

Class-Incremental Learning Replay-Based Continual Learning Incremental Learning Catastrophic Forgetting

Aug 13, 2026cs.LG

Incremental Evaluation and Training in Relational Deep Learning

Relational Deep Learning (RDL) models multi-tabular databases as temporal heterogeneous graphs to enable end-to-end representation learning. However, prevailing RDL evaluation practices rely on static, single-episode dataset snapshots, overlooking the continuous, time-evolving nature of real-world databases. Consequently, current RDL benchmarks fail to capture how model performance changes as new data accumulates over time. To address this limitation, we introduce an incremental, multi-episode evaluation and training paradigm to assess and improve the temporal robustness and adaptability of state-of-the-art RDL models. Using established large-scale datasets, we examine data evolution and model training dynamics, demonstrating that temporal concept drifts occur in the majority of predictive tasks. We present multiple incremental training regimes for fine-tuning the models and demonstrate that transfer learning is both feasible and highly effective in the RDL setting. Alongside a new temporal evaluation metric that prioritizes near-future accuracy, we show that our incrementally fine-tuned models consistently outperform the standard, expensive, from-scratch trained baselines.

Jakub Peleška, Gustav Šír

Czech Technical University in Prague

Concept Drift Online Continual Learning Incremental Learning Relational Deep Learning

Aug 11, 2026cs.CV

BPG: Balancing Plasticity and Generalization for Domain Incremental Learning

Deep neural networks excel in various tasks but struggle to generalize across evolving data distributions, leading to significant performance degradation under domain shifts. Domain incremental learning (DIL) addresses this challenge by enabling models to continuously adapt while retaining prior knowledge. Among existing DIL approaches, the parameter-isolation paradigm achieves state-of-the-art performance. However, these methods often adopt a one-size-fits-all approach to adapt to new domains, resulting in either insufficient learning capacity or redundant parameters. In this work, we propose BPG, a unified framework that addresses both challenges through two complementary components: BPG-Adapter, which dynamically determines each domain's adapter hidden dimension based on domain-specific feature separability, and BPG-Inference, a soft domain mixture strategy that integrates multiple domain-specific models at test time, mitigating domain ID misselection. Experimental results on DomainNet, CDDB, and CORe50 demonstrate that BPG consistently outperforms uniform adapter-based approaches and hard domain selection strategies, achieving state-of-the-art average accuracy while reducing forgetting to as low as 0.22% on DomainNet.

Qiang Wang, Songlin Dong, Shaokun Wang +5

College of Artificial Intelligence, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China · Shenzhen University of Advanced Technology, Shenzhen, China · Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China +1

Domain-Incremental Learning Incremental Learning

Aug 8, 2026cs.CV

NeuroGuard: Neural Gradient Update Aware of Representation Damage

Long-tailed class-incremental learning (LT-CIL) must learn new classes from imbalanced streams while retaining old classes. Existing methods mainly change replay, classifiers, or losses. We study a different factor, namely how strongly the feature representation should be updated at each task boundary. We propose NeuroGuard, an update-control method added to DGR, a replay-based LT-CIL baseline, without adding learnable parameters. NeuroGuard preserves DGR's replay memory, classifier, and set of loss terms. Adaptive Gradient Scaling (AGS) converts teacher uncertainty into one task-wise gradient scale. Confidence-Ranked Knowledge Distillation Reweighting (CRK) gives larger knowledge-distillation weights to replay samples that the teacher predicts less decisively. Fragility-Blended Entropy Gate (FBE) adds old-memory leakage to the scale decision. Across five LT-CIL settings, NeuroGuard improves over DGR in every setting. In the four main benchmark comparisons, it achieves the best task-agnostic accuracy among the compared methods. The gains extend to both old- and new-class accuracy, while medium-frequency accuracy improves consistently across all five settings. Controlled comparisons show that the gain does not come from generic gradient suppression: AGS outperforms a matched fixed-scale control in all five settings, demonstrating that boundary-specific scaling is more effective than applying the same average scale throughout learning.

Taigo Sakai, Kazuhito Hotta

Meijo University, 1-501 Shiogamaguchi, Tempaku-ku, Nagoya 468-8502, Japan

Class-Incremental Learning Adaptive Loss Weighting Replay-Based Continual Learning Incremental Learning

Aug 5, 2026cs.CV

MAGIC-SSCIL: Manifold Anchoring and Geometric Incremental Calibration for Semi-Supervised Class Incremental Learning

Semi-supervised Class Incremental Learning (SSCIL) is a severe challenge for neural networks, and it is hardest in the exemplar-free setting where no past data may be stored. Existing methods forget catastrophically due to feature drift, and their pseudo-labels become increasingly unreliable as the label space grows. In this paper, we propose MAGIC (Manifold Anchoring and Geometric Incremental Calibration), a framework that stabilizes plasticity without storing exemplars. MAGIC's design centers on two components. The first is Soft-Weighted Geometry Calibration (SWGC), which uses graph-based label propagation on the learner's plastic feature space to weight and calibrate class means and variances computed on the frozen backbone; from these calibrated Gaussians, we sample phantom features that stand in for data from previous tasks. The second is a Geometric Structural Alignment (GSA) objective that preserves representation topology by matching the relational structure of student and teacher heads and aligning feature anchors with the fixed classifier prototypes, locking the orientation of the feature space. Together, these constraints keep the adapter from drifting, so geometric relations between classes remain stable as new classes arrive. We implement MAGIC with a frozen ResNet-18 backbone and a learnable plastic adapter. Across CIFAR-100, CUB-200, and ImageNet-R, at label ratios of 1%, 5%, and 10%, MAGIC improves average incremental accuracy over most of the supervised CIL methods equipped with FixMatch and native SSCIL baselines; the largest gains occur in the fine-grained, low-label setting, where confidence thresholding fails most clearly.

Yousef Abdi, Mohammad Asadpour, Yousef Seyfari

Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Universityof Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran · Faculty of Engineering, University of Maragheh, Maragheh,Iran

Class-Incremental Learning Incremental Learning Semi-Supervised Learning

Aug 5, 2026cs.AI

NeuMoSync: End-to-End Neuromodulatory Control for Plasticity and Adaptability in Continual Learning

Continual learning (CL) requires models to learn tasks sequentially, yet deep neural networks often suffer from plasticity loss and poor knowledge transfer, which can impede their long-term adaptability. Drawing high-level inspiration from global neuromodulatory mechanisms in the brain, we introduce Neuromodulation and Synchronization (NeuMoSync), a novel architecture that integrates dynamic, neuron-specific modulation into deep neural networks to enhance their adaptability and plasticity. NeuMoSync extends standard neural network architectures with learnable feature vectors for each neuron that track network-wide historical context and with a module operating at a higher level of abstraction. This module synthesizes neuron-specific signals, conditioned on both current inputs and the network's evolving state, to adaptively regulate activation dynamics and synaptic plasticity. Evaluated on diverse CL benchmarks, including memorization (Random Label CIFAR-10 and Random Label MNIST), concept drift (Shuffle CIFAR-10 and Shuffle Mini-ImageNet), class-incremental learning (Class Split ImageNet and Class Split CIFAR-100), and domain-incremental learning (Permuted MNIST), NeuMoSync demonstrates strong performance in retaining plasticity and achieves improvements in both forward and backward adaptation compared with existing methods. Ablation studies validate the necessity of each component, while analysis of the learned modulatory signals reveals interpretable coordination patterns across tasks. Our work underscores the potential of integrating global coordination mechanisms into deep learning systems to advance robust, adaptive continual learning. The code is publicly available at https://github.com/RoozbehRazavi/NeuMoSync.

Seyed Roozbeh Razavi Rohani, Khashayar Khajavi, Wesley Chung +2

Department of Computer Science Simon Fraser University · Department of Computer Science McGill Univeristy, Mila - Quebec AI Institute

Class-Incremental Learning Dynamic Neural Networks Continual Learning Domain-Incremental Learning Incremental Learning

Aug 2, 2026cs.LG

Plasticity of Growing and Elastic Neural Networks in Online Continual Learning

Neural networks that can grow or both grow and shrink during learning, referred to as growing neural networks and elastic neural networks, respectively, have recently been explored in offline continual learning with a particular focus on catastrophic forgetting. Driven by the observations that 1) online continual learning closely resembles how animals learn; 2) loss of plasticity---the progressive decline in a learning network's ability to learn---is another crucial challenge facing continual learning; and 3) incremental introduction of randomly initialized hidden units was recently shown to help preserve plasticity, in this paper, we study the plasticity of several foundational growing and elastic networks in online continual learning. Our experiments in supervised learning settings show that adaptive growing networks, which incrementally incorporate new, randomly initialized units to the network while keeping all existing connections adaptive, can maintain high prediction accuracy without losing plasticity despite the continuous increase in the dead hidden unit proportion. Furthermore, we demonstrate that adaptive elastic networks, which in addition to progressively adding new hidden units also prune estimated dead hidden units at the beginning of each new task, can achieve excellent accuracy without loss of plasticity while simultaneously maintaining a near-constant, compact size. Our results suggest that growing and elastic networks, which exhibit the ability to adapt its structure to the relevant learning objectives, can be a promising class of algorithms also for preserving high plasticity in online continual learning.

Jeong Min Kong, Richard S. Sutton

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) · Department of Computing Science University of Alberta Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii)

Loss of Plasticity Dynamic Neural Networks Online Continual Learning Incremental Learning

Aug 2, 2026cs.LG

AdaHAT: Adaptive Hard Attention to the Task in Task-Incremental Learning

Catastrophic forgetting is a major problem in task-incremental learning, where neural networks tend to overwrite previously learned knowledge when trained on new tasks. A number of architecture-based approaches have been proposed to address this problem. However, the architecture-based approaches suffer from another problem related to network capacity when the networks learn long task sequences: As a network is trained on an increasing number of new tasks in a long task sequence, a growing proportion of active parameters becomes static to prevent forgetting of previously learned knowledge. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Hard Attention to the Task (AdaHAT) with an adaptive attention mechanism which allows adaptive updates to static parameters by taking into account the information about previous tasks on both the importance of these parameters to previous tasks and the current network capacity. Based on this idea, we develop a new neural network architecture incorporating our proposed AdaHAT mechanism. AdaHAT extends an existing architecture-based approach, Hard Attention to the Task (HAT), to better support task-incremental learning over long task sequences. We conduct experiments on a number of datasets and compare AdaHAT with task-incremental learning baselines including HAT. Our experimental results show that AdaHAT achieves better average performance across tasks than these baselines, especially on long task sequences, demonstrating the benefits from balancing the trade-off between stability and plasticity of a network when learning such sequences of tasks, alleviating the network capacity problem. Our code is available at pengxiang-wang.com/projects/continual-learning-arena.

Pengxiang Wang, Hongbo Bo, Jun Hong +2

School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, China · Population Health Sciences Institute, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK · School of Engineering Mathematics and Technology, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK +1

Stability-Plasticity Dilemma Incremental Learning Catastrophic Forgetting

Aug 1, 2026cs.LG

Relative Parameter Importance in Task-Agnostic Replay-Free Continual Learning

Achieving continual learning (CL) with deep neural networks requires balancing stability and plasticity while enabling knowledge transfer. In this work, we focus on offline learning algorithms under the constraints: (I) no access to training data from prior tasks (II) no access to task-id at inference time. We introduce a novel measure, the relative parameter-importance, which measures the relative importance of each parameter with respect to both the current and past tasks. Parameters with high relative importance are interpreted as more important for maintaining past-task stability and thus heavily regularised, whereas parameters with low relative-importance are allowed to be more freely updated. Unlike existing methods, our approach allows the update of parameters with high past-task importance when they have low relative-importance, thus enabling backward knowledge transfer in addition to tackling the stability-plasticity trade-off. We demonstrate improvements against state-of-the-art CL methods on both class-incremental and domain-incremental learning text classification problems and provide insights for extending our method to text generation problems. Code available at: https://github.com/itsmemala/LACL

Malavika Suresh, Ikechukwu Nkisi-Orji, Nirmalie Wiratunga

Robert Gordon University

Class-Incremental Learning Domain-Incremental Learning Incremental Learning

Jul 29, 2026cs.LG

The Art of Not Forgetting A Local Learning Architecture for Continual Learning

We introduce CMP (Cognitive Memory Primitive), a continual-learning architecture that repre?sents inputs as sparse relational codes, stores them in a two-tier competitive memory, and learns through local updates without end-to-end backpropagation through its feature-generating system. We investigate whether combining sparse representations, local learning, and persistent memory can reduce catastrophic forgetting relative to conventional backpropagation-based continual?learning approaches. On a controlled domain-incremental byte-level language modeling protocol, CMP demonstrates substantially lower backward transfer than a parameter-matched Trans?former trained with online Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC). Across a three-seed replicated 15-domain experiment, CMP exhibits stable forgetting behavior, while separate head-to-head comparisons and domain-order analyses show consistently lower forgetting than the evaluated Transformer baseline under the reported experimental settings. We report these findings alongside a substantial single-domain accuracy gap relative to the Transformer, a null result on a vision benchmark, and a documented failure to combine CMP with an independent accuracy-improving mechanism, reflecting our commitment to reporting both positive and negative outcomes. These results suggest that the combination of sparse representations, local learning, and persistent memory is a promising direction for continual learning, while motivating further investigation into the respective roles of learning rules, representations, and architectural design in mitigating catastrophic forgetting.

Ashmith Atmuri, Yashaswini Rao Bhogarajula

Arkadhi Research

Memory-Augmented Neural Networks Continual Learning Domain-Incremental Learning Incremental Learning Local Learning Catastrophic Forgetting