Dual-Phase Continual Learning: Supervised Adaptation Meets Unsupervised Retention
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Foundational Vision-Language Models (VLMs) excel across diverse tasks, but adapting them to new domains without forgetting prior knowledge remains a critical challenge. Continual Learning (CL) addresses this challenge by enabling models to learn sequentially from new data while mitigating the forgetting of prior information, typically under supervised settings involving label shift. Nonetheless, abrupt distribution shifts can still cause substantial forgetting, potentially nullifying the benefits of supervised updates, especially when storing or replaying past data is infeasible. In this work, we propose leveraging unlabeled testtime data in an unsupervised manner to reinforce prior task performance without requiring replay or stored examples. Unlike traditional Test Time Adaptation (TTA), which primarily focuses on domain shift or corruption, our method improves performance on earlier tasks by exploiting representative test samples encountered during deployment. We introduce a simple Teacher-Student framework with gradient-based sparse parameter updates, and show that it effectively mitigates forgetting in class-incremental CL for VLMs, offering a memory-free alternative to episodic replay with strong empirical results.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".