← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2611.10655 · v1
STABLE: A Continual Learning Optimizer with Adaptive Drift Control
首次提交 2026-11-07 19:01
版本更新 2026-11-07 19:01
雷达观测 2026-11-10 11:14
摘要
Continual learning suffers from catastrophic forgetting, leading to the loss of past knowledge and unstable adaptation across task streams. Existing approaches typically address this issue through replay buffers, architectural changes, or additional regularization terms. We argue that forgetting is a consequence of unstable learning dynamics, which may benefit from an optimizer-level solution. The main challenge is that learning dynamics are time-dependent, as demonstrated by empirical phenomena such as the stability gap. First, we formally prove that, for distance-based classifiers, bounded parameter drift guarantees bounded margin erosion under a local score-stability condition. Based on this insight, we propose STABLE, a primal-dual optimizer with adaptive drift control. STABLE enforces a drift budget by increasing the dual variable when the budget is violated and decreasing it otherwise. This results in high stability without penalizing plasticity. Experiments on long-horizon unimodal streams and CLIP-based multimodal streams show that vanilla PEFT baselines trained with STABLE match or outperform specialized continual learning methods. In the multimodal setting, STABLE further preserves zero-shot transfer, matching or exceeding dedicated multimodal continual learning methods.
作者备注：Accepted at the 40th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026)
观测到的版本
相邻记录可能跳过中间版本；首次发现 v2 及以上也会标为版本更新。
v2 · 2026-11-10 18:00 · 最新观测版本
STABLE: A Continual Learning Optimizer with Adaptive Drift Control
Continual learning suffers from catastrophic forgetting, leading to the loss of past knowledge and unstable adaptation across task streams. Existing approaches typically address this issue through replay buffers, architectural changes, or additional regularization terms. We argue that forgetting is a consequence of unstable learning dynamics, which may benefit from an optimizer-level solution. The main challenge is that learning dynamics are time-dependent, as demonstrated by empirical phenomena such as the stability gap. First, we formally prove that, for distance-based classifiers, bounded parameter drift guarantees bounded margin erosion under a local score-stability condition. Based on this insight, we propose STABLE, a primal-dual optimizer with adaptive drift control. STABLE enforces a drift budget by increasing the dual variable when the budget is violated and decreasing it otherwise. This results in high stability without penalizing plasticity. Experiments on long-horizon unimodal streams and CLIP-based multimodal streams show that vanilla PEFT baselines trained with STABLE match or outperform specialized continual learning methods. In the multimodal setting, STABLE further preserves zero-shot transfer, matching or exceeding dedicated multimodal continual learning methods. Code is available at https://github.com/atlas-luiss/STABLE.
查看此版本解读 →查看此版本原文 ↗v1 · 2026-11-07 19:01
STABLE: A Continual Learning Optimizer with Adaptive Drift Control
Continual learning suffers from catastrophic forgetting, leading to the loss of past knowledge and unstable adaptation across task streams. Existing approaches typically address this issue through replay buffers, architectural changes, or additional regularization terms. We argue that forgetting is a consequence of unstable learning dynamics, which may benefit from an optimizer-level solution. The main challenge is that learning dynamics are time-dependent, as demonstrated by empirical phenomena such as the stability gap. First, we formally prove that, for distance-based classifiers, bounded parameter drift guarantees bounded margin erosion under a local score-stability condition. Based on this insight, we propose STABLE, a primal-dual optimizer with adaptive drift control. STABLE enforces a drift budget by increasing the dual variable when the budget is violated and decreasing it otherwise. This results in high stability without penalizing plasticity. Experiments on long-horizon unimodal streams and CLIP-based multimodal streams show that vanilla PEFT baselines trained with STABLE match or outperform specialized continual learning methods. In the multimodal setting, STABLE further preserves zero-shot transfer, matching or exceeding dedicated multimodal continual learning methods.
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