# PROL : Rehearsal Free Continual Learning in Streaming Data via Prompt Online Learning

Source: [PROL : Rehearsal Free Continual Learning in Streaming Data via Prompt Online Learning](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa7a081e209131cea80aa4>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-27T06:57:50.280Z

Authors: M. Anwar Ma'sum, Mahardhika Pratama, Savitha Ramasamy, Lin Liu, Habibullah Habibullah, Ryszard Kowalczyk

Published: 2025-07-16T15:04:46.000Z

## Abstract

The data privacy constraint in online continual learning (OCL), where the data can be seen only once, complicates the catastrophic forgetting problem in streaming data. A common approach applied by the current SOTAs in OCL is with the use of memory saving exemplars or features from previous classes to be replayed in the current task. On the other hand, the prompt-based approach performs excellently in continual learning but with the cost of a growing number of trainable parameters. The first approach may not be applicable in practice due to data openness policy, while the second approach has the issue of throughput associated with the streaming data. In this study, we propose a novel prompt-based method for online continual learning that includes 4 main components: (1) single light-weight prompt generator as a general knowledge, (2) trainable scaler-and-shifter as specific knowledge, (3) pre-trained model (PTM) generalization preserving, and (4) hard-soft updates mechanism. Our proposed method achieves significantly higher performance than the current SOTAs in CIFAR100, ImageNet-R, ImageNet-A, and CUB dataset. Our complexity analysis shows that our method requires a relatively smaller number of parameters and achieves moderate training time, inference time, and throughput. For further study, the source code of our method is available at https://github.com/anwarmaxsum/PROL.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12305>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12305.pdf>)
