No Forgetting Learning: Buffer-free Continual Learning Classification

arXiv:2503.04638v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most Continual Learning (CL) methods maintain performance on earlier tasks by storing exemplars in a replay buffer, introducing memory overhead that scales with the number of tasks and raising privacy concerns in regulated domains. We propose No Forgetting Learning (NFL), a buffer-free framework for class- and task-incremental learning that instead exploits the inherent redundancy of overparameterized networks. NFL decomposes the network into a shared backbone and task-specific heads, then applies a stepwise freezing protocol: new capabilities are first isolated, shared representations are adapted under knowledge distillation, and all components are jointly refined with dual soft-target anchoring. NFL+ augments this pipeline with an under-complete auto-encoder that preserves informative features from previous tasks and corrects the prediction bias caused by class imbalance. NFL+LoRA further extends the framework to pre-trained Vision Transformers by confining updates to a low-rank subspace with Fisher-weighted regularization, maintaining constant backbone memory cost regardless of the number of tasks. On CIFAR-100, Tiny-ImageNet, and ImageNet-1000 across up to 50 incremental tasks, NFL+ outperforms all buffer-free baselines and matches memory-based methods while requiring only 2.53\% of their model size. We also propose a Plasticity--Stability score for more balanced trade-off evaluation.