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Unifying Detection and Adaptation in Task-Free Continual Learning

Dezheng Han Anlan Zhang Zhi-Hao Zhu Shuai-Shuai Guo
Aug 2026 · 0 citations · 37 references
Computer Science

TL;DR

Experiments show that FiUni can effectively infer latent batch-level task affiliations and achieve competitive performance against advanced task-aware CL methods with fewer trainable parameters.

Abstract

To mitigate catastrophic forgetting in downstream continual learning (CL) for large language models (LLMs), existing methods typically constrain parameter updates or introduce task-specific adaptation modules. However, these methods often rely on explicit task boundaries during training, limiting their applicability to realistic task-free scenarios. In this paper, we propose a \textbf{Fi}sher-guided \textbf{uni}fied (\textbf{FiUni}) framework for batch-level task detection and parameter-efficient continual adaptation. FiUni is motivated by a key observation about the Fisher information matrix (FIM) of pre-trained models: the orthogonality among the principal subspaces of its Kronecker-Factored Approximate Curvature (K-FAC) approximation, estimated from a small number of downstream task samples, can reflect the similarity between different tasks. Based on this observation, FiUni constructs FIM-derived frozen subspaces to guide low-rank adaptation (LoRA), while matching the Fisher principal subspace of each incoming batch window with historical subspaces. This enables FiUni to adaptively determine whether to reuse existing knowledge, expand a related subspace, or create a new subspace, dynamically balancing knowledge sharing and task isolation. Experiments show that FiUni can effectively infer latent batch-level task affiliations and achieve competitive performance against advanced task-aware CL methods with fewer trainable parameters.

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