Pareto Continual Learning: Preference-Conditioned Learning and Adaption for Dynamic Stability-Plasticity Trade-off

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lai, Song, Zhao, Zhe, Zhu, Fei, Lin, Xi, Zhang, Qingfu, Meng, Gaofeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866908290248605696
author Lai, Song
Zhao, Zhe
Zhu, Fei
Lin, Xi
Zhang, Qingfu
Meng, Gaofeng
author_facet Lai, Song
Zhao, Zhe
Zhu, Fei
Lin, Xi
Zhang, Qingfu
Meng, Gaofeng
contents Continual learning aims to learn multiple tasks sequentially. A key challenge in continual learning is balancing between two objectives: retaining knowledge from old tasks (stability) and adapting to new tasks (plasticity). Experience replay methods, which store and replay past data alongside new data, have become a widely adopted approach to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, these methods neglect the dynamic nature of the stability-plasticity trade-off and aim to find a fixed and unchanging balance, resulting in suboptimal adaptation during training and inference. In this paper, we propose Pareto Continual Learning (ParetoCL), a novel framework that reformulates the stability-plasticity trade-off in continual learning as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem. ParetoCL introduces a preference-conditioned model to efficiently learn a set of Pareto optimal solutions representing different trade-offs and enables dynamic adaptation during inference. From a generalization perspective, ParetoCL can be seen as an objective augmentation approach that learns from different objective combinations of stability and plasticity. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and settings demonstrate that ParetoCL outperforms state-of-the-art methods and adapts to diverse continual learning scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_23390
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pareto Continual Learning: Preference-Conditioned Learning and Adaption for Dynamic Stability-Plasticity Trade-off
Lai, Song
Zhao, Zhe
Zhu, Fei
Lin, Xi
Zhang, Qingfu
Meng, Gaofeng
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Continual learning aims to learn multiple tasks sequentially. A key challenge in continual learning is balancing between two objectives: retaining knowledge from old tasks (stability) and adapting to new tasks (plasticity). Experience replay methods, which store and replay past data alongside new data, have become a widely adopted approach to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, these methods neglect the dynamic nature of the stability-plasticity trade-off and aim to find a fixed and unchanging balance, resulting in suboptimal adaptation during training and inference. In this paper, we propose Pareto Continual Learning (ParetoCL), a novel framework that reformulates the stability-plasticity trade-off in continual learning as a multi-objective optimization (MOO) problem. ParetoCL introduces a preference-conditioned model to efficiently learn a set of Pareto optimal solutions representing different trade-offs and enables dynamic adaptation during inference. From a generalization perspective, ParetoCL can be seen as an objective augmentation approach that learns from different objective combinations of stability and plasticity. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets and settings demonstrate that ParetoCL outperforms state-of-the-art methods and adapts to diverse continual learning scenarios.
title Pareto Continual Learning: Preference-Conditioned Learning and Adaption for Dynamic Stability-Plasticity Trade-off
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23390