Revisiting Prototype Rehearsal for Exemplar-Free Continual Learning: Manifold-Aware Boundary Sampling with Adaptive Class-Balanced Loss
Exemplar-free class-incremental learning (EFCIL) aims to acquire new classes over time without storing raw data. Historically, prototype rehearsal, which samples around stored class prototypes and mixes them with current-task data, has been a popular strategy to reduce catastrophic forgetting. However, recent drift-compensation methods that explicitly realign prototypes in the evolving feature space consistently outperform prototype-based rehearsal, raising the question of whether rehearsal itself is fundamentally limited. We argue that the performance gap stems not from the idea of prototype rehearsal per se, but from how it is typically instantiated: existing approaches treat prototypes...
| Authors | Hongye Xu, Bartosz Krawczyk |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 4 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 4 June 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.