aiqbench analysis
This research introduces GAP-Prompt, a novel continual learning framework that combats catastrophic forgetting by dynamically adapting prompts at the instance level rather than relying on static strategies. By integrating instance-conditioned gating with dynamic knowledge fusion and shared prompt distillation, the method significantly outperforms existing approaches on fine-grained benchmarks like CUB-200 while maintaining efficiency in pre-trained models. The work advances the practical deployment of large models in sequential learning scenarios where preserving historical knowledge is critical.
GAP-Prompt: Gated Adaptive Prompting for Efficient Continual Learning
arXiv:2608.23782v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning faces the persistent challenge of catastrophic forgetting, where sequential task updates degrade previously acquired knowledge. While prompt-based methods integrated with pre-trained models offer a compelling solution by freezing the backbone, they often rely on static, task-level prompting strategies that overlook fine-grained intra-task diversity. In this paper, we propose Gated Adaptive Prompting (GAP-Prompt), a novel method that introduces instance-level adaptability to the prompting process. GAP-Prompt consists of three synergistic modules: (1) instance-conditioned gating, which dynamically determines optimal prompt injection layers for each individual image; (2) dynamic knowledge fusion, which performs instance-aware aggregation of current and historical prompts, enabling knowledge integration across tasks; and (3) shared prompt distillation, which anchors foundational knowledge in early shared layers to mitigate forgetting. Extensive evaluations on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-R, and CUB-200 benchmarks demonstrate that GAP-Prompt consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, on the fine-grained CUB-200 dataset, GAP-Prompt reaches 87.29% accuracy, approaching the joint training upper bound (88.00%) and outperforming existing methods by a significant margin.
Abstract:Continual learning faces the persistent challenge of catastrophic forgetting, where sequential task updates degrade previously acquired knowledge. While prompt-based methods integrated with pre-trained models offer a compelling solution by freezing the backbone, they often rely on static, task-level prompting strategies that overlook fine-grained intra-task diversity. In this paper, we propose Gated Adaptive Prompting (GAP-Prompt), a novel method that introduces instance-level adaptability to the prompting process. GAP-Prompt consists of three synergistic modules: (1) instance-conditioned gating, which dynamically determines optimal prompt injection layers for each individual image; (2) dynamic knowledge fusion, which performs instance-aware aggregation of current and historical prompts, enabling knowledge integration across tasks; and (3) shared prompt distillation, which anchors foundational knowledge in early shared layers to mitigate forgetting. Extensive evaluations on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-R, and CUB-200 benchmarks demonstrate that GAP-Prompt consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, on the fine-grained CUB-200 dataset, GAP-Prompt reaches 87.29% accuracy, approaching the joint training upper bound (88.00%) and outperforming existing methods by a significant margin.
Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2608.23782 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2608.23782v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.23782 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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