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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04638 |
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| _version_ | 1866915989798518784 |
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| author | Vahedifar, Mohammad Ali Zhang, Qi |
| author_facet | Vahedifar, Mohammad Ali Zhang, Qi |
| contents | Most Continual Learning (CL) methods maintain performance on earlier tasks by storing exemplars in a replay buffer, introducing memory overhead that scales with the number of tasks and raising privacy concerns in regulated domains. We propose No Forgetting Learning (NFL), a buffer-free framework for class- and task-incremental learning that instead exploits the inherent redundancy of overparameterized networks.
NFL decomposes the network into a shared backbone and task-specific heads, then applies a stepwise freezing protocol: new capabilities are first isolated, shared representations are adapted under knowledge distillation, and all components are jointly refined with dual soft-target anchoring. NFL+ augments this pipeline with an under-complete auto-encoder that preserves informative features from previous tasks and corrects the prediction bias caused by class imbalance. NFL+LoRA further extends the framework to pre-trained Vision Transformers by confining updates to a low-rank subspace with Fisher-weighted regularization, maintaining constant backbone memory cost regardless of the number of tasks.
On CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet-1000 across up to 50 incremental tasks, NFL+ outperforms all buffer-free baselines and matches memory-based methods while requiring only 2.53\% of their model size. We also propose a Plasticity--Stability score for more balanced trade-off evaluation. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_04638 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | No Forgetting Learning: Buffer-free Continual Learning Classification Vahedifar, Mohammad Ali Zhang, Qi Machine Learning Most Continual Learning (CL) methods maintain performance on earlier tasks by storing exemplars in a replay buffer, introducing memory overhead that scales with the number of tasks and raising privacy concerns in regulated domains. We propose No Forgetting Learning (NFL), a buffer-free framework for class- and task-incremental learning that instead exploits the inherent redundancy of overparameterized networks. NFL decomposes the network into a shared backbone and task-specific heads, then applies a stepwise freezing protocol: new capabilities are first isolated, shared representations are adapted under knowledge distillation, and all components are jointly refined with dual soft-target anchoring. NFL+ augments this pipeline with an under-complete auto-encoder that preserves informative features from previous tasks and corrects the prediction bias caused by class imbalance. NFL+LoRA further extends the framework to pre-trained Vision Transformers by confining updates to a low-rank subspace with Fisher-weighted regularization, maintaining constant backbone memory cost regardless of the number of tasks. On CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet-1000 across up to 50 incremental tasks, NFL+ outperforms all buffer-free baselines and matches memory-based methods while requiring only 2.53\% of their model size. We also propose a Plasticity--Stability score for more balanced trade-off evaluation. |
| title | No Forgetting Learning: Buffer-free Continual Learning Classification |
| topic | Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04638 |