Is Parameter Isolation Better for Prompt-Based Continual Learning?

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Li, Jiangyang, Ding, Chenhao, Dong, Songlin, Wang, Qiang, Zhao, Jianchao, He, Yuhang, Gong, Yihong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914288805871616
author Li, Jiangyang
Ding, Chenhao
Dong, Songlin
Wang, Qiang
Zhao, Jianchao
He, Yuhang
Gong, Yihong
author_facet Li, Jiangyang
Ding, Chenhao
Dong, Songlin
Wang, Qiang
Zhao, Jianchao
He, Yuhang
Gong, Yihong
contents Prompt-based continual learning methods effectively mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, most existing methods assign a fixed set of prompts to each task, completely isolating knowledge across tasks and resulting in suboptimal parameter utilization. To address this, we consider the practical needs of continual learning and propose a prompt-sharing framework. This framework constructs a global prompt pool and introduces a task-aware gated routing mechanism that sparsely activates a subset of prompts to achieve dynamic decoupling and collaborative optimization of task-specific feature representations. Furthermore, we introduce a history-aware modulator that leverages cumulative prompt activation statistics to protect frequently used prompts from excessive updates, thereby mitigating inefficient parameter usage and knowledge forgetting. Extensive analysis and empirical results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing static allocation strategies in effectiveness and efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_20894
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Is Parameter Isolation Better for Prompt-Based Continual Learning?
Li, Jiangyang
Ding, Chenhao
Dong, Songlin
Wang, Qiang
Zhao, Jianchao
He, Yuhang
Gong, Yihong
Machine Learning
Prompt-based continual learning methods effectively mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However, most existing methods assign a fixed set of prompts to each task, completely isolating knowledge across tasks and resulting in suboptimal parameter utilization. To address this, we consider the practical needs of continual learning and propose a prompt-sharing framework. This framework constructs a global prompt pool and introduces a task-aware gated routing mechanism that sparsely activates a subset of prompts to achieve dynamic decoupling and collaborative optimization of task-specific feature representations. Furthermore, we introduce a history-aware modulator that leverages cumulative prompt activation statistics to protect frequently used prompts from excessive updates, thereby mitigating inefficient parameter usage and knowledge forgetting. Extensive analysis and empirical results demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms existing static allocation strategies in effectiveness and efficiency.
title Is Parameter Isolation Better for Prompt-Based Continual Learning?
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.20894