Re-Evaluating Continual Learning with Few-Shot Adaptation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2606.03843v1
• Date: Tue, 02 Jun 2026 16:23:09 GMT
• Title: Re-Evaluating Continual Learning with Few-Shot Adaptation
• Abstract summary: Continual learning methods aim to maximize the stability and plasticity of machine learning models that are trained on a sequence of tasks.<n>The standard measure of stability (i.e., forgetting) is the 0-shot performance of a model on previously learned tasks, and plasticity, the performance on the most recently learned task.<n>We propose few-shot evaluation as a more comprehensive assessment of the stability and plasticity of a continual learning system.
• Score: 2.6167179129983142
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Continual learning methods aim to maximize the stability and plasticity of machine learning models that are trained on a sequence of tasks. The standard measure of stability (i.e., forgetting) is the 0-shot performance of a model on previously learned tasks, and plasticity, the performance on the most recently learned task. However, 0-shot evaluation does not fully measure a model or method's ability to retain learned information or adapt quickly to new information, as it requires perfect recall across multiple tasks. In this paper, we propose few-shot evaluation as a more comprehensive assessment of the stability and plasticity of a continual learning system. We conduct a fine-grained assessment on task sequences for continual image classification and find that this paradigm produces novel insights into the performance of popular continual learning strategies. Through few-shot evaluation with a novel metric -- per-shot plasticity -- we show that adding `foresight' to continual learning methods via the meta-learning of a short sequence of future tasks induces learning-to-learn behavior over the task sequence.

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