Pre-trained model-based continual learning (PTMCL) has garnered growing attention, as it enables more rapid acquisition of new knowledge by leveraging the extensive foundational understanding inherent in pre-trained model (PTM). Most existing PTMCL methods use Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) to learn new knowledge while consolidating existing memory. However, they often face some challenges. A major challenge lies in the misalignment of classification heads, as the classification head of each task is trained within a distinct feature space, leading to inconsistent decision boundaries across tasks and, consequently, increased forgetting. Another critical limitation stems from the restricted feature-level knowledge accumulation, with feature learning typically restricted to the initial task only, which constrains the model's representation capabilities. To address these issues, we propose a method named DUal-level Knowledge Accumulation and Ensemble (DUKAE) that leverages both feature-level and decision-level knowledge accumulation by aligning classification heads into a unified feature space through Gaussian distribution sampling and introducing an adaptive expertise ensemble to fuse knowledge across feature subspaces. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-R, CUB-200, and Cars-196 datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our approach.
View on arXiv@article{li2025_2504.06521,
title={ DUKAE: DUal-level Knowledge Accumulation and Ensemble for Pre-Trained Model-Based Continual Learning },
author={ Songze Li and Tonghua Su and Xu-Yao Zhang and Qixing Xu and Zhongjie Wang },
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.06521},
year={ 2025 }
}