arXiv:2603.07787cs.LG2026-03

提出ARROW优化器,让ViT模型持续学习不退化。

Vision Transformers that Never Stop Learning

  • 用局部指标诊断ViT梯度更新问题,发现注意力层不稳定
  • 传统重初始化无效,新方法通过动态调整梯度方向提升适应力
  • 适合需要长期迭代训练的视觉任务,如在线学习场景

模型在持续学习中逐渐丧失适应新任务的能力,称为可塑性丧失,这是持续学习的核心挑战。尽管这一现象在全连接网络中已有广泛研究,但在结构异质的注意力模型如视觉变压器(ViTs)中的机制仍不清楚。本文对ViTs中的可塑性丧失进行系统性研究,采用细粒度局部指标分析参数多样性和使用情况。结果表明,堆叠式注意力模块存在加剧可塑性丧失的不稳定性,而前馈网络模块退化更严重。我们评估了多种缓解方法,发现基于参数重初始化的方法无法恢复可塑性,而显式调控更新过程的方法更有效。受此启发,我们提出ARROW优化器,利用在线曲率估计自适应地重塑注意力模块的梯度方向,从而保持可塑性。大量实验显示,ARROW显著提升持续学习能力,在新任务上维持更高性能。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Loss of plasticity refers to the progressive inability of a model to adapt to new tasks and poses a fundamental challenge for continual learning. While this phenomenon has been extensively studied in homogeneous neural architectures, such as multilayer perceptrons, its mechanisms in structurally heterogeneous, attention-based models such as Vision Transformers (ViTs) remain underexplored. In this work, we present a systematic investigation of loss of plasticity in ViTs, including a fine-grained diagnosis using local metrics that capture parameter diversity and utilization. Our analysis reveals that stacked attention modules exhibit increasing instability that exacerbates plasticity loss, while feed-forward network modules suffer even more pronounced degradation. Furthermore, we evaluate several approaches for mitigating plasticity loss. The results indicate that methods based on parameter re-initialization fail to recover plasticity in ViTs, whereas approaches that explicitly regulate the update process are more effective. Motivated by this insight, we propose ARROW, a geometry-aware optimizer that preserves plasticity by adaptively reshaping gradient directions using an online curvature estimate for the attention module. Extensive experiments show that ARROW effectively improves plasticity and maintains better performance on newly encountered tasks.

视觉变压器持续学习优化器可塑性

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