Continual Learning with Synthetic Boundary Experience Blending

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hsu, Chih-Fan, Chang, Ming-Ching, Chen, Wei-Chao
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Hsu, Chih-Fan
Chang, Ming-Ching
Chen, Wei-Chao
author_facet Hsu, Chih-Fan
Chang, Ming-Ching
Chen, Wei-Chao
contents Continual learning (CL) seeks to mitigate catastrophic forgetting when models are trained with sequential tasks. A common approach, experience replay (ER), stores past exemplars but only sparsely approximates the data distribution, yielding fragile and oversimplified decision boundaries. We address this limitation by introducing synthetic boundary data (SBD), generated via differential privacy: inspired noise into latent features to create boundary-adjacent representations that implicitly regularize decision boundaries. Building on this idea, we propose Experience Blending (EB), a framework that jointly trains on exemplars and SBD through a dual-model aggregation strategy. EB has two components: (1) latent-space noise injection to synthesize boundary data, and (2) end-to-end training that jointly leverages exemplars and SBD. Unlike standard experience replay, SBD enriches the feature space near decision boundaries, leading to more stable and robust continual learning. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny ImageNet demonstrate consistent accuracy improvements of 10%, 6%, and 13%, respectively, over strong baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_23534
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Continual Learning with Synthetic Boundary Experience Blending
Hsu, Chih-Fan
Chang, Ming-Ching
Chen, Wei-Chao
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Continual learning (CL) seeks to mitigate catastrophic forgetting when models are trained with sequential tasks. A common approach, experience replay (ER), stores past exemplars but only sparsely approximates the data distribution, yielding fragile and oversimplified decision boundaries. We address this limitation by introducing synthetic boundary data (SBD), generated via differential privacy: inspired noise into latent features to create boundary-adjacent representations that implicitly regularize decision boundaries. Building on this idea, we propose Experience Blending (EB), a framework that jointly trains on exemplars and SBD through a dual-model aggregation strategy. EB has two components: (1) latent-space noise injection to synthesize boundary data, and (2) end-to-end training that jointly leverages exemplars and SBD. Unlike standard experience replay, SBD enriches the feature space near decision boundaries, leading to more stable and robust continual learning. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and Tiny ImageNet demonstrate consistent accuracy improvements of 10%, 6%, and 13%, respectively, over strong baselines.
title Continual Learning with Synthetic Boundary Experience Blending
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.23534