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Unlike humans, who are capable of continual learning over their lifetimes, artificial neural networks have long been known to suffer from a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting, whereby new learning can lead to abrupt erasure of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-20 Christos Kaplanis , Murray Shanahan , Claudia Clopath

Artificial neural networks thrive in solving the classification problem for a particular rigid task, acquiring knowledge through generalized learning behaviour from a distinct training phase. The resulting network resembles a static entity…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-19 Matthias De Lange , Rahaf Aljundi , Marc Masana , Sarah Parisot , Xu Jia , Ales Leonardis , Gregory Slabaugh , Tinne Tuytelaars

Catastrophic forgetting -- the phenomenon of a neural network learning a task t1 and losing the ability to perform it after being trained on some other task t2 -- is a long-standing problem for neural networks [McCloskey and Cohen, 1989].…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-17 Nicholas Dronen , Randall Balestriero

An important problem in machine learning is the ability to learn tasks in a sequential manner. If trained with standard first-order methods most models forget previously learned tasks when trained on a new task, which is often referred to…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-12-10 Reinhard Heckel

Humans and most animals can learn new tasks without forgetting old ones. However, training artificial neural networks (ANNs) on new tasks typically cause it to forget previously learned tasks. This phenomenon is the result of "catastrophic…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-04-04 Nicolas Y. Masse , Gregory D. Grant , David J. Freedman

Deep artificial neural networks famously struggle to learn from non-stationary streams of data. Without dedicated mitigation strategies, continual learning is associated with continuous forgetting of previous tasks and a progressive loss of…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-12-29 Suzanne van der Veldt , Gido M. van de Ven , Sanne Moorman , Guillaume Etter

Continual learning aims to sequentially learn new tasks without forgetting previous tasks' knowledge (catastrophic forgetting). One factor that can cause forgetting is the interference between the gradients on losses from different tasks.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Xueying Bai , Jinghuan Shang , Yifan Sun , Niranjan Balasubramanian

While deep neural networks have demonstrated groundbreaking performance in various settings, these models often suffer from \emph{catastrophic forgetting} when trained on new tasks in sequence. Several works have empirically demonstrated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-21 Etash Guha , Vihan Lakshman

Quantum computers may outperform classical computers on machine learning tasks. In recent years, a variety of quantum algorithms promising unparalleled potential to enhance, speed up, or innovate machine learning have been proposed. Yet,…

Catastrophic forgetting is a problem faced by many machine learning models and algorithms. When trained on one task, then trained on a second task, many machine learning models "forget" how to perform the first task. This is widely believed…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2015-03-05 Ian J. Goodfellow , Mehdi Mirza , Da Xiao , Aaron Courville , Yoshua Bengio

Forgetting is often seen as an unwanted characteristic in both human and machine learning. However, we propose that forgetting can in fact be favorable to learning. We introduce "forget-and-relearn" as a powerful paradigm for shaping the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-02-02 Hattie Zhou , Ankit Vani , Hugo Larochelle , Aaron Courville

We investigate recurrent neural networks with asymmetric interactions and demonstrate that the inclusion of self-couplings or sparse excitatory inter-module connections leads to the emergence of a densely connected manifold of dynamically…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2026-01-01 Davide Badalotti , Carlo Baldassi , Marc Mézard , Mattia Scardecchia , Riccardo Zecchina

Multimodal continual instruction tuning enables multimodal large language models to sequentially adapt to new tasks while building upon previously acquired knowledge. However, this continual learning paradigm faces the significant challenge…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Songze Li , Mingyu Gao , Tonghua Su , Xu-Yao Zhang , Zhongjie Wang

The ability to learn more and more concepts over time from incrementally arriving data is essential for the development of a life-long learning system. However, deep neural networks often suffer from forgetting previously learned concepts…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-08 Huaiyu Li , Weiming Dong , Bao-Gang Hu

Continual learning is the sequential learning of different tasks by a machine learning model. Continual learning is known to be hindered by catastrophic interference or forgetting, i.e. rapid unlearning of earlier learned tasks when new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-14 Heinrich van Deventer , Anna Sergeevna Bosman

Contemporary neural networks are limited in their ability to learn from evolving streams of training data. When trained sequentially on new or evolving tasks, their accuracy drops sharply, making them unsuitable for many real-world…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-02-19 Sudhanshu Mittal , Silvio Galesso , Thomas Brox

Neural networks struggle in continual learning settings from catastrophic forgetting: when trials are blocked, new learning can overwrite the learning from previous blocks. Humans learn effectively in these settings, in some cases even…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2022-11-07 Jacob Russin , Maryam Zolfaghar , Seongmin A. Park , Erie Boorman , Randall C. O'Reilly

Catastrophic forgetting in continual learning is a common destructive phenomenon in gradient-based neural networks that learn sequential tasks, and it is much different from forgetting in humans, who can learn and accumulate knowledge…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-11-17 Guannan Hu , Wu Zhang , Hu Ding , Wenhao Zhu

Human beings are able to master a variety of knowledge and skills with ongoing learning. By contrast, dramatic performance degradation is observed when new tasks are added to an existing neural network model. This phenomenon, termed as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-25 Xin Yao , Tianchi Huang , Chenglei Wu , Rui-Xiao Zhang , Lifeng Sun

Catastrophic forgetting remains a fundamental challenge for neural networks when tasks are trained sequentially. In this work, we reformulate continual learning as a control problem where learning and preservation signals compete within…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Sander de Haan , Yassine Taoudi-Benchekroun , Pau Vilimelis Aceituno , Benjamin F. Grewe