FlyPrompt: Brain-Inspired Random-Expanded Routing with Temporal-Ensemble Experts for General Continual Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Yan, Hongwei, Sun, Guanglong, Zhou, Kanglei, Li, Qian, Wang, Liyuan, Zhong, Yi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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_version_ 1866918405274075136
author Yan, Hongwei
Sun, Guanglong
Zhou, Kanglei
Li, Qian
Wang, Liyuan
Zhong, Yi
author_facet Yan, Hongwei
Sun, Guanglong
Zhou, Kanglei
Li, Qian
Wang, Liyuan
Zhong, Yi
contents General continual learning (GCL) challenges intelligent systems to learn from single-pass, non-stationary data streams without clear task boundaries. While recent advances in continual parameter-efficient tuning (PET) of pretrained models show promise, they typically rely on multiple training epochs and explicit task cues, limiting their effectiveness in GCL scenarios. Moreover, existing methods often lack targeted design and fail to address two fundamental challenges in continual PET: how to allocate expert parameters to evolving data distributions, and how to improve their representational capacity under limited supervision. Inspired by the fruit fly's hierarchical memory system characterized by sparse expansion and modular ensembles, we propose FlyPrompt, a brain-inspired framework that decomposes GCL into two subproblems: expert routing and expert competence improvement. FlyPrompt introduces a randomly expanded analytic router for instance-level expert activation and a temporal ensemble of output heads to dynamically adapt decision boundaries over time. Extensive theoretical and empirical evaluations demonstrate FlyPrompt's superior performance, achieving up to 11.23%, 12.43%, and 7.62% gains over state-of-the-art baselines on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-R, and CUB-200, respectively. Our source code is available at https://github.com/AnAppleCore/FlyGCL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_01976
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FlyPrompt: Brain-Inspired Random-Expanded Routing with Temporal-Ensemble Experts for General Continual Learning
Yan, Hongwei
Sun, Guanglong
Zhou, Kanglei
Li, Qian
Wang, Liyuan
Zhong, Yi
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
General continual learning (GCL) challenges intelligent systems to learn from single-pass, non-stationary data streams without clear task boundaries. While recent advances in continual parameter-efficient tuning (PET) of pretrained models show promise, they typically rely on multiple training epochs and explicit task cues, limiting their effectiveness in GCL scenarios. Moreover, existing methods often lack targeted design and fail to address two fundamental challenges in continual PET: how to allocate expert parameters to evolving data distributions, and how to improve their representational capacity under limited supervision. Inspired by the fruit fly's hierarchical memory system characterized by sparse expansion and modular ensembles, we propose FlyPrompt, a brain-inspired framework that decomposes GCL into two subproblems: expert routing and expert competence improvement. FlyPrompt introduces a randomly expanded analytic router for instance-level expert activation and a temporal ensemble of output heads to dynamically adapt decision boundaries over time. Extensive theoretical and empirical evaluations demonstrate FlyPrompt's superior performance, achieving up to 11.23%, 12.43%, and 7.62% gains over state-of-the-art baselines on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-R, and CUB-200, respectively. Our source code is available at https://github.com/AnAppleCore/FlyGCL.
title FlyPrompt: Brain-Inspired Random-Expanded Routing with Temporal-Ensemble Experts for General Continual Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01976