Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Streaming Generative and Predictive Learning via Stateful Replay

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Du, Wenzhang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Du, Wenzhang
author_facet Du, Wenzhang
contents Many deployed learning systems must update models on streaming data under memory constraints. The default strategy, sequential fine-tuning on each new phase, is architecture-agnostic but often suffers catastrophic forgetting when later phases correspond to different sub-populations or tasks. Replay with a finite buffer is a simple alternative, yet its behaviour across generative and predictive objectives is not well understood. We present a unified study of stateful replay for streaming autoencoding, time series forecasting, and classification. We view both sequential fine-tuning and replay as stochastic gradient methods for an ideal joint objective, and use a gradient alignment analysis to show when mixing current and historical samples should reduce forgetting. We then evaluate a single replay mechanism on six streaming scenarios built from Rotated MNIST, ElectricityLoadDiagrams 2011-2014, and Airlines delay data, using matched training budgets and three seeds. On heterogeneous multi task streams, replay reduces average forgetting by a factor of two to three, while on benign time based streams both methods perform similarly. These results position stateful replay as a strong and simple baseline for continual learning in streaming environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_17936
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Streaming Generative and Predictive Learning via Stateful Replay
Du, Wenzhang
Machine Learning
68T05, 68T10, 68Q32
I.2.6; I.5.1; H.2.8
Many deployed learning systems must update models on streaming data under memory constraints. The default strategy, sequential fine-tuning on each new phase, is architecture-agnostic but often suffers catastrophic forgetting when later phases correspond to different sub-populations or tasks. Replay with a finite buffer is a simple alternative, yet its behaviour across generative and predictive objectives is not well understood. We present a unified study of stateful replay for streaming autoencoding, time series forecasting, and classification. We view both sequential fine-tuning and replay as stochastic gradient methods for an ideal joint objective, and use a gradient alignment analysis to show when mixing current and historical samples should reduce forgetting. We then evaluate a single replay mechanism on six streaming scenarios built from Rotated MNIST, ElectricityLoadDiagrams 2011-2014, and Airlines delay data, using matched training budgets and three seeds. On heterogeneous multi task streams, replay reduces average forgetting by a factor of two to three, while on benign time based streams both methods perform similarly. These results position stateful replay as a strong and simple baseline for continual learning in streaming environments.
title Mitigating Catastrophic Forgetting in Streaming Generative and Predictive Learning via Stateful Replay
topic Machine Learning
68T05, 68T10, 68Q32
I.2.6; I.5.1; H.2.8
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.17936