Monte Carlo Functional Regularisation for Continual Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hao, Pengcheng, Zhu, Menghao Waiyan William, Kuruoglu, Ercan Engin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Hao, Pengcheng
Zhu, Menghao Waiyan William
Kuruoglu, Ercan Engin
author_facet Hao, Pengcheng
Zhu, Menghao Waiyan William
Kuruoglu, Ercan Engin
contents Continual learning (CL) is crucial for the adaptation of neural network models to new environments. Although outperforming weight-space regularisation approaches, the functional regularisation-based CL methods suffer from high computational costs and large linear approximation errors. In this work, we present a new functional regularisation CL framework, called MCFRCL, which approximates model prediction distributions by Monte Carlo (MC) sampling. Moreover, three continuous distributions are leveraged to capture the statistical characteristics of the MC samples via moment-based methods. Additionally, both the Wasserstein distance and the Kullback-Leibler (KL) distance are employed to construct the regularisation function. The proposed MCFRCL is evaluated against multiple benchmark methods on the MNIST and CIFAR datasets, with simulation results highlighting its effectiveness in both prediction accuracy and training efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_13006
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Monte Carlo Functional Regularisation for Continual Learning
Hao, Pengcheng
Zhu, Menghao Waiyan William
Kuruoglu, Ercan Engin
Machine Learning
Continual learning (CL) is crucial for the adaptation of neural network models to new environments. Although outperforming weight-space regularisation approaches, the functional regularisation-based CL methods suffer from high computational costs and large linear approximation errors. In this work, we present a new functional regularisation CL framework, called MCFRCL, which approximates model prediction distributions by Monte Carlo (MC) sampling. Moreover, three continuous distributions are leveraged to capture the statistical characteristics of the MC samples via moment-based methods. Additionally, both the Wasserstein distance and the Kullback-Leibler (KL) distance are employed to construct the regularisation function. The proposed MCFRCL is evaluated against multiple benchmark methods on the MNIST and CIFAR datasets, with simulation results highlighting its effectiveness in both prediction accuracy and training efficiency.
title Monte Carlo Functional Regularisation for Continual Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13006