HomeMachine LearningarXiv:2605.30198

Active Continual Learning with Metaplastic Binary Bayesian Neural Networks

Machine Learning2026-05v1license

Abstract

Always-on edge systems must keep learning as conditions change under tight compute budgets and must detect unreliable predictions. Bayesian binary neural networks are attractive in this setting, but mean-field Bernoulli posteriors can saturate on long non-stationary streams, wiping out epistemic uncertainty and freezing plasticity. We propose BiMU, derived from a bounded-memory variational objective that balances stability, plasticity, and forgetting. BiMU combines a data term with controlled relaxation toward the prior and an uncertainty-dependent step size that prevents saturation and sustains informative uncertainty. This non-degenerate posterior enables fully online, buffer-free active querying via Monte Carlo disagreement, reducing label queries and backpropagation updates under imbalance. BiMU sustains learning and strong OOD detection on 1000-tasks Permuted-MNIST, and on OpenLORIS-Object achieves up to 32×\times label/update savings at matched accuracy under class imbalance and feature compression.

Comments: Accepted at ICML 2026

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.30198,
  title  = {Active Continual Learning with Metaplastic Binary Bayesian Neural Networks},
  author = {Kellian Cottart and Théo Ballet and Djohan Bonnet and Damien Querlioz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.30198},
  year   = {2026}
}