Active Continual Learning with Metaplastic Binary Bayesian Neural Networks
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 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}
}