arXiv AI

Normative Loss Landscape Navigation: A Trajectory-Based Approach to Mitigating Forgetting in Incremental Learning

The paper introduces TMLN (Trajectory-Modulatory Landscape Navigation), a method that treats continual learning as an optimal control problem on a curved loss landscape. It uses a diagonal empirical Fisher Information Matrix to approximate a local Riemannian manifold and dynamically modulates a preconditioner based on the network’s historical parameter trajectory. This trajectory‑based preconditioning is integrated into gradient updates to protect important parameter directions without adding explicit penalties, and experiments on class‑ and domain‑incremental benchmarks show a significant reduction in the loss barrier between tasks.

arXiv AI
Sep 24

Parameter Importance-Driven Continual Learning for Foundation Models

The paper introduces PIECE, a Parameter Importance-Driven Continual Learning method that selectively updates only 0.1% of core parameters to preserve general abilities while learning new domain knowledge. PIECE employs two importance estimators—PIECE‑F using Fisher Information and PIECE‑S combining gradient and curvature information—to guide updates. Experiments on three language models and two multimodal models demonstrate that PIECE maintains general capabilities and achieves state‑of‑the‑art continual learning performance without accessing prior training data or adding parameter overhead.

By Lingxiang Wang, Hainan Zhang, Zhiming Zheng
arXiv AI
4d ago

Estimating and Orthogonalizing Unknown Pre-training Gradients for Continual Fine-tuning of Large Language Models

The paper introduces EoupCT, a framework that estimates and orthogonalizes unknown pre‑training gradients to mitigate catastrophic forgetting during continual fine‑tuning of large language models. It generates pseudo data most susceptible to forgetting using a learnable soft prompt with Gumbel‑Softmax, then jointly optimizes model parameters and the prompt via a first‑order Pareto optimizer to enforce orthogonality between new task updates and the estimated gradients. Experiments on multiple LLMs show that EoupCT preserves both task‑specific performance and the models’ inherent general‑purpose knowledge.

By Bing Wang, Changchun Li, Xin-Qiang Cai, Lin Yuanbo Wu, Ximing Li, Gang Niu, Masashi Sugiyama
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 30

Gated Adaptation for Continual Learning in Human Activity Recognition

arXiv:2603. 10046v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Wearable sensors in Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems increasingly support applications such as remote health monitoring, elderly care, and smart home automation, all of which rely on robust human activity recognition (HAR).

By Reza Rahimi Azghan, Gautham Krishna Gudur, Mohit Malu, Edison Thomaz, Giulia Pedrielli, Pavan Turaga, Hassan Ghasemzadeh
arXiv AI
Jul 15

Continual Learning with Elastic Regularization and Synthetic Replay for Federated MLLM Fine-Tuning

arXiv:2607. 12112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated fine-tuning of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) across distributed networks enables privacy-sensitive adaptation to evolving data streams, yet a fundamental obstacle prevents robust deployment in dynamic environments: catastrophic forgetting, wherein sequential task updates erase previously acquired knowledge across visual, linguistic, and cross-modal representations.

By Jing Liu, Chenxuanyin Zou, Jiayang Ren, Gaoyun Fang, Chengfang Li, Yan Wang, Zhenchao Ma, Bo Hu