Unlocking [CLS] Features for Continual Post-Training

TMLR Paper6271 Authors

Abstract: Continual learning requires models to integrate new classes or domains over time while preserving previously acquired knowledge. Within this paradigm, foundation models often achieve strong performance, but they still remain subject to the stability–plasticity trade-off, where excessive plasticity leads to forgetting of prior knowledge, and excessive stability constrains the adaptation. This necessitates an effective post-training strategy that introduces minimal yet functional modifications. To address this challenge, we first introduce a new parameter-efficient fine-tuning module ‘Learn and Calibrate’, or LuCA, designed to acquire task-specific knowledge through an adapter-calibrator couple, enabling well-refined feature representations. Then, for each task, we deploy a sparse LuCA module on top of the last classification token [CLS] just before the classifier, which we refer to as ‘Token-level Sparse Calibration and Adaptation’, or TOSCA. By leaving the generalization capabilities of the foundation models intact and adapting exclusively via the last token, our approach achieves a harmonious balance between stability and plasticity while reducing both training and inference complexity. We demonstrate that TOSCA yields state-of-the-art performance while introducing 8 times fewer parameters compared to prior methods.

Submission Type: Regular submission (no more than 12 pages of main content)

Assigned Action Editor: ~Sarath_Chandar1

Submission Number: 6271