The paper introduces Restoring without Forgetting (RwF), a continual learning framework for image restoration that handles multiple degradations sequentially without accessing prior data. RwF trains a lightweight adapter for each new degradation, uses an unsupervised routing mechanism to select the correct restoration path, and achieves significant PSNR gains over fine‑tuning on five benchmark degradation domains. The method also demonstrates strong transfer performance on eleven real‑degradation datasets with high routing accuracy.
By Alif Ashrafee, Bartosz Krawczyk
arXiv:2601. 13020v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual instruction tuning (CIT) requires multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to adapt to a stream of tasks without forgetting prior capabilities.
By Zhiyan Hou, Haiyun Guo, Haokai Ma, Yandu Sun, Yonghui Yang, Jinqiao Wang
arXiv:2608. 01997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Single-optimizer training is a poor fit for the distinct phases of deep network optimization: adaptive methods handle noisy early gradients well but overshoot flat minima, while SGD with momentum generalizes better in the late phase but converges slowly early on.
By Alok Kumar Pandey, Umang Chaturvedi, Aatish Rana, Gopi Krishna Nedanuri
arXiv:2606. 27759v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training binary neural networks (BNNs) from scratch is dominated by the straight-through estimator (STE), whose forward/backward mismatch produces severe accuracy degradation as networks deepen.
By Evan Gibson Smith, Bashima Islam
arXiv:2601. 18699v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Sequential fine-tuning of Large Language Models (LLMs) adaptation to target tasks often triggers catastrophic forgetting, where the acquisition of novel target skills degrades ancestral capabilities.
By Gustav Olaf Yunus Laitinen-Fredriksson Lundstrom-Imanov
arXiv:2607. 09202v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning commonly relies on post-hoc mechanisms such as replay, elastic regularization, or distillation.
By Julius St\"ork
The paper introduces the Drift Contract, a spectral update geometry for local learning that improves depth robustness and hyperparameter stability. By applying momentum orthogonalization with spectral step scaling to per‑layer updates, the authors achieve consistent performance across a wide range of widths and depths on CIFAR‑10 MLPs, outperforming local Adam and providing a per‑layer, input‑conditioned drift bound. The study also shows that the spectral geometry itself, rather than step‑size rules, drives the observed depth robustness, while a negative result indicates that the stability benefit is limited to non‑normalized layers.
By Fabien Polly
arXiv:2607. 17944v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce CMP (Cognitive Memory Primitive), an architecture that represents inputs as sparse relational codes, stores them in a two-tier competitive memory, and learns entirely through local, gradient-free updates, with no backpropagation anywhere in the network.
By Ashmith Atmuri, Akshay Kumar, Yashaswini Rao Bhogarajula
arXiv:2605. 29547v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Deep learning optimization relies heavily on the assumption of smooth loss landscapes, a condition systematically violated by modern architectures due to non-smooth components such as ReLU activations and quantization operators.
By Ruoran Xu, Borong She, Xiaobo Jin, Qiufeng Wang
arXiv:2608. 11690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning must absorb new tasks without erasing old ones, and replay---mixing a small buffer of past examples into current training---is among the most effective remedies for catastrophic forgetting.
By Tieliang Gong, Zhongbo Zhang, Wen Wen, Yong-Jin Liu
arXiv:2411. 16073v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Inspired by the Well-initialized Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (WLTH), we introduce Soft-TransFormers (Soft-TF), a continual learning framework that adapts a frozen pre-trained Transformer through task-specific soft subnetworks: real-valued multiplicative masks over the query, key, value, and output projections of selected self-attention layers.
By Haeyong Kang, Chang D. Yoo
arXiv:2606. 25971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern neural network training relies on optimizers such as Adam and Muon which act on each weight matrix as a single object.
By Alexander H\"agele, Alejandro Hern\'andez-Cano, Atli Kosson, Martin Jaggi