Continual Learning Beyond Experience Rehearsal and Full Model Surrogates

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Bhat, Prashant, Niesten, Laurens, Arani, Elahe, Zonooz, Bahram
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Bhat, Prashant
Niesten, Laurens
Arani, Elahe
Zonooz, Bahram
author_facet Bhat, Prashant
Niesten, Laurens
Arani, Elahe
Zonooz, Bahram
contents Continual learning (CL) has remained a significant challenge for deep neural networks as learning new tasks erases previously acquired knowledge, either partially or completely. Existing solutions often rely on experience rehearsal or full model surrogates to mitigate CF. While effective, these approaches introduce substantial memory and computational overhead, limiting their scalability and applicability in real-world scenarios. To address this, we propose SPARC, a scalable CL approach that eliminates the need for experience rehearsal and full-model surrogates. By effectively combining task-specific working memories and task-agnostic semantic memory for cross-task knowledge consolidation, SPARC results in a remarkable parameter efficiency, using only 6% of the parameters required by full-model surrogates. Despite its lightweight design, SPARC achieves superior performance on Seq-TinyImageNet and matches rehearsal-based methods on various CL benchmarks. Additionally, weight re-normalization in the classification layer mitigates task-specific biases, establishing SPARC as a practical and scalable solution for CL under stringent efficiency constraints.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_21942
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Continual Learning Beyond Experience Rehearsal and Full Model Surrogates
Bhat, Prashant
Niesten, Laurens
Arani, Elahe
Zonooz, Bahram
Machine Learning
Continual learning (CL) has remained a significant challenge for deep neural networks as learning new tasks erases previously acquired knowledge, either partially or completely. Existing solutions often rely on experience rehearsal or full model surrogates to mitigate CF. While effective, these approaches introduce substantial memory and computational overhead, limiting their scalability and applicability in real-world scenarios. To address this, we propose SPARC, a scalable CL approach that eliminates the need for experience rehearsal and full-model surrogates. By effectively combining task-specific working memories and task-agnostic semantic memory for cross-task knowledge consolidation, SPARC results in a remarkable parameter efficiency, using only 6% of the parameters required by full-model surrogates. Despite its lightweight design, SPARC achieves superior performance on Seq-TinyImageNet and matches rehearsal-based methods on various CL benchmarks. Additionally, weight re-normalization in the classification layer mitigates task-specific biases, establishing SPARC as a practical and scalable solution for CL under stringent efficiency constraints.
title Continual Learning Beyond Experience Rehearsal and Full Model Surrogates
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.21942