The paper introduces a generative continual learning framework that uses growing self‑organizing maps (GSOMs) enhanced with learned distributional statistics and encoder‑decoder models for class‑incremental learning. GSOM units store mean, variance, and covariance estimates to synthesize replay samples, enabling exemplar‑free training without raw data or explicit task boundaries. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that the unsupervised method competes with supervised memory‑based approaches and outperforms memory‑free baselines, especially in single‑class incremental scenarios, and provides baseline results for TinyImageNet and MiniImageNet.
By Pujan Thapa, Alexander Ororbia, Travis Desell
arXiv:2607. 09785v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Traditionally, continual learning has assumed access to labeled data, yet many real-world applications -- such as lifelong robotics -- require models to adapt continuously from unlabeled streams.
By Sergi Masip, Alicja Dobrzeniecka, Jonathan Swinnen, Joachim Collin, Bart{\l}omiej Twardowski, Szymon {\L}ukasik, Tinne Tuytelaars
arXiv:2606. 31275v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Online Continual Self-Supervised Learning (OCSSL) aims to learn representations from a continuous stream of unlabeled data, without knowledge of task boundaries and under memory constraints.
By Julien Lefebvre, Stefan Duffner, Mathieu Lefort
The paper introduces Multiple Embedding Replay Selection (MERS), a graph‑based method that combines supervised and self‑supervised embeddings to improve sample selection for replay buffers in continual learning. MERS replaces traditional buffer selection modules and demonstrates consistent performance gains over state‑of‑the‑art strategies, especially in low‑memory settings. Experiments on CIFAR‑100 and TinyImageNet show that MERS outperforms single‑embedding baselines without adding model parameters or increasing replay volume, making it a practical, drop‑in enhancement for replay‑based continual learning.
By Danit Yanowsky, Daphna Weinshall
The paper argues that catastrophic forgetting and loss of plasticity alone cannot explain why naive sequential training underperforms offline joint training. It introduces data co-observation as a third factor, showing that observing training data together consistently improves performance across supervised and self-supervised settings. The study also reinterprets common continual learning methods, suggesting that memory replay’s success stems from restoring co-observation benefits rather than merely mitigating forgetting.
By Timm Hess, Abhishek Jha, Gido M. van de Ven, Tinne Tuytelaars
The paper presents a generative continual learning framework that extends self‑organizing maps (SOMs) with learned distributional statistics and encoder–decoder models for class‑incremental learning. By storing running means, variances, and covariances for each SOM unit, the method can generate synthetic samples for replay without storing raw data, enabling exemplar‑free learning. Experiments on CIFAR‑10, CIFAR‑100, and TinyImageNet show competitive or superior performance compared to state‑of‑the‑art memory‑based and memory‑free methods, and the approach also allows easy visualization and post‑training generative use.
By Pujan Thapa, Alexander Ororbia, Travis Desell
arXiv:2605. 20247v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Catastrophic forgetting remains a major obstacle to continual learning in large language models (LLMs) and vision--language models (VLMs).
By Yang Liu, Toan Nguyen, Flora D. Salim
arXiv:2603. 12055v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual learning of pretrained vision-language models (VLMs) is prone to catastrophic forgetting, yet current approaches adapt to new tasks without explicitly preserving the cross-modal semantic geometry inherited from pretraining and previous stages, allowing new-task supervision to induce geometric distortion.
By Chiyuan He, Zihuan Qiu, Fanman Meng, Runtong Zhang, Linfeng Xu, Qingbo Wu, Hongliang Li
arXiv:2608. 13660v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Medical image segmentation models are typically trained under the assumption that all data are available simultaneously.
By Amal Saqib, Tausifa Jan Saleem, Numan Saeed, Mohammad Yaqub
arXiv:2509. 13211v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The ability to learn continuously over time remains a major challenge for modern machine learning systems, even in the era of Foundation Models.
By Irene Testa, Luigi Quarantiello, Eric Nuertey Coleman, Samrat Mukherjee, Julio Hurtado, Vincenzo Lomonaco
RegCL is a non‑replay continual learning framework that adapts the Segment Anything Model (SAM) for visual grounding across evolving multi‑sensorial media domains. It consolidates domain‑specific segmentation knowledge into a single lightweight SAM adapter by incrementally merging LoRA‑style AugModules and preserving compact historical feature statistics. Experiments on five heterogeneous datasets demonstrate that RegCL retains performance while adapting to new domains, outperforming other non‑replay continual learning and merging baselines.
By Yuan-Chen Shu, Zhiwei Lin, Xiaoyu Zhou, Yongtao Wang
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.
By Haihua Luo, Xuming Ran, Tommi K\"arkk\"ainen, Huiyan Xue, Zhonghua Chen, Qi Xu, Fengyu Cong