Mind the Gap: Why Continual Learning Fails—and How Local Classifier Alignment Fixes It
Opening — Why this matters now Modern AI systems are expected to learn continuously. Unlike static models trained once and deployed forever, real-world systems—recommendation engines, robotics agents, fraud detection pipelines—must adapt to new data streams without forgetting what they already know. Unfortunately, neural networks have a habit of doing exactly that: forgetting. The phenomenon, politely called catastrophic forgetting, occurs when a model trained on a new task overwrites parameters that encoded earlier knowledge. In practical terms, this means yesterday’s expertise disappears the moment today’s data arrives. ...