Schedule-Robust Continual Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Continual learning (CL) tackles a fundamental challenge in machine learning, aiming to continuously learn novel data from non-stationary data streams while mitigating forgetting of previously learned data. Although existing CL algorithms have introduced various practical techniques for combating forgetting, little attention has been devoted to studying how data schedules - which dictate how the sample distribution of a data stream evolves over time - affect the CL problem. Empirically, most CL methods are susceptible to schedule changes: they exhibit markedly lower accuracy when dealing with more "difficult" schedules over the same underlying training data. In practical scenarios, data schedules are often unknown and a key challenge is thus to design CL methods that are robust to diverse schedules to ensure model reliability. In this work, we introduce the novel concept of schedule robustness for CL and propose Schedule-Robust Continual Learning (SCROLL), a strong baseline satisfying this desirable property. SCROLL trains a linear classifier on a suitably pre-trained representation, followed by model adaptation using replay data only. We connect SCROLL to a meta-learning formulation of CL with provable guarantees on schedule robustness. Empirically, the proposed method significantly outperforms existing CL methods and we provide extensive ablations to highlight its properties.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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".