CL-LoRA: Continual Low-Rank Adaptation for Rehearsal-Free Class-Incremental Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: He, Jiangpeng, Duan, Zhihao, Zhu, Fengqing
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author He, Jiangpeng
Duan, Zhihao
Zhu, Fengqing
author_facet He, Jiangpeng
Duan, Zhihao
Zhu, Fengqing
contents Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to learn new classes sequentially while retaining the knowledge of previously learned classes. Recently, pre-trained models (PTMs) combined with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) have shown remarkable performance in rehearsal-free CIL without requiring exemplars from previous tasks. However, existing adapter-based methods, which incorporate lightweight learnable modules into PTMs for CIL, create new adapters for each new task, leading to both parameter redundancy and failure to leverage shared knowledge across tasks. In this work, we propose ContinuaL Low-Rank Adaptation (CL-LoRA), which introduces a novel dual-adapter architecture combining \textbf{task-shared adapters} to learn cross-task knowledge and \textbf{task-specific adapters} to capture unique features of each new task. Specifically, the shared adapters utilize random orthogonal matrices and leverage knowledge distillation with gradient reassignment to preserve essential shared knowledge. In addition, we introduce learnable block-wise weights for task-specific adapters, which mitigate inter-task interference while maintaining the model's plasticity. We demonstrate CL-LoRA consistently achieves promising performance under multiple benchmarks with reduced training and inference computation, establishing a more efficient and scalable paradigm for continual learning with pre-trained models.
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
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spellingShingle CL-LoRA: Continual Low-Rank Adaptation for Rehearsal-Free Class-Incremental Learning
He, Jiangpeng
Duan, Zhihao
Zhu, Fengqing
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) aims to learn new classes sequentially while retaining the knowledge of previously learned classes. Recently, pre-trained models (PTMs) combined with parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) have shown remarkable performance in rehearsal-free CIL without requiring exemplars from previous tasks. However, existing adapter-based methods, which incorporate lightweight learnable modules into PTMs for CIL, create new adapters for each new task, leading to both parameter redundancy and failure to leverage shared knowledge across tasks. In this work, we propose ContinuaL Low-Rank Adaptation (CL-LoRA), which introduces a novel dual-adapter architecture combining \textbf{task-shared adapters} to learn cross-task knowledge and \textbf{task-specific adapters} to capture unique features of each new task. Specifically, the shared adapters utilize random orthogonal matrices and leverage knowledge distillation with gradient reassignment to preserve essential shared knowledge. In addition, we introduce learnable block-wise weights for task-specific adapters, which mitigate inter-task interference while maintaining the model's plasticity. We demonstrate CL-LoRA consistently achieves promising performance under multiple benchmarks with reduced training and inference computation, establishing a more efficient and scalable paradigm for continual learning with pre-trained models.
title CL-LoRA: Continual Low-Rank Adaptation for Rehearsal-Free Class-Incremental Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24816