To Retain or to Adapt? Generalizing Continual Learning
arXiv:2607. 05609v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Continual Learning (CL) literature has long been driven by the goal of mitigating catastrophic forgetting.
arXiv:2607. 05609v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Continual Learning (CL) literature has long been driven by the goal of mitigating catastrophic forgetting.
arXiv:2607. 04364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual post-training is becoming a central paradigm for adapting vision-language models to evolving tasks.
arXiv:2606. 03843v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning methods aim to maximize the stability and plasticity of machine learning models that are trained on a sequence of tasks.
The paper introduces Adaptive Mask Selection and Composition (AMSC), a method that estimates task similarity using non‑parametric Wasserstein embeddings from state‑action‑reward samples. AMSC selects and weights previously learned policies based on z‑score‑normalized sparsemax similarity scores, forming a prior for new tasks. Experiments on CT‑graph, MiniGrid, and Continual World show that AMSC improves mean performance and forward transfer while avoiding forgetting, highlighting the importance of selecting relevant prior knowledge and its layer‑specific composition.
The paper addresses the conflict between generalization and continuous adaptation in few‑shot and continual learning. It proposes a Complementary Learning System (CLS) that separates a fast Short‑Term Memory (STM) for memorizing recent inputs from a slow Long‑Term Memory (LTM) that provides robust, generalized perceptions. Experiments on image classification show the CLS model resists forgetting in domain‑incremental continual learning and outperforms other continual learners in few‑shot settings, though overall accuracy is slightly lower than some existing methods.
The paper investigates how model-based reinforcement learning can support continual learning by reusing prior knowledge. It introduces a contextual Markov decision process that separates behavioral and physical context, and studies zero‑shot reuse in FourRooms tasks using Dyna‑Q and TD‑MPC. The experiments show that zero‑shot reuse degrades under physical context changes and that this degradation is strongly tied to the observation representation, highlighting representation generalization as a key bottleneck.
arXiv:2603. 11653v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) for Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models is a promising direction toward self-improving embodied agents that can adapt in openended, evolving environments.
arXiv:2505. 18347v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual reinforcement learning (RL) concerns agents that are expected to learn continually, rather than converge to a policy that is then fixed for evaluation.
arXiv:2607. 07847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, the next question is how can we enable models to continually learn?
arXiv:2603. 11201v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The world is inherently dynamic, and continual learning aims to enable models to adapt to ever-evolving data streams.
The paper introduces HaMo, a Harness-Model collaborative framework designed for long-horizon continual learning. HaMo combines fast non‑parametric experience accumulation—distilling trajectories into strategy‑level experience cards for immediate retrieval—with slow parametric adaptation, training the model to interpret, ground, and execute these strategies across changing contexts. A retrieval‑coverage‑based selection mechanism identifies compact, complementary trajectories for parameter updates, and experiments demonstrate that HaMo outperforms both harness‑only and model‑only approaches in within‑domain and cross‑domain settings, improving retention and adaptation.
Memory-Centric Continual Learning for AI Agents proposes a framework that redefines agent memory as a driver of future actions rather than a passive retrieval cache. It introduces a three-axis taxonomy—substrates, assets, and policies—to structure memory, a two-loop lifecycle for updating memory state and refining management policies, and an evaluation protocol that isolates genuine behavioral gains from simple context expansion. The paper also presents a memory scaling framework to model how performance scales with experience, storage, and compute across non-parametric and parametric memory.