Despite continual learning's long and well-established academic history, its application in real-world scenarios remains rather limited. This paper contends that this gap is attributable to a misalignment between the actual challenges of continual learning and the evaluation protocols in use, rendering proposed solutions ineffective for addressing the complexities of real-world setups. We validate our hypothesis and assess progress to date, using a new 3D semantic segmentation benchmark, OCL-3DSS. We investigate various continual learning schemes from the literature by utilizing more realistic protocols that necessitate online and continual learning for dynamic, real-world scenarios (eg., in robotics and 3D vision applications). The outcomes are sobering: all considered methods perform poorly, significantly deviating from the upper bound of joint offline training. This raises questions about the applicability of existing methods in realistic settings. Our paper aims to initiate a paradigm shift, advocating for the adoption of continual learning methods through new experimental protocols that better emulate real-world conditions to facilitate breakthroughs in the field.

通过使用模拟真实世界条件的新实验协议，本文验证了关于连续学习的假设，并评估迄今取得的进展。结果表明，考虑到所有方法均表现不佳，明显偏离联合离线训练的上限，这对现实环境中的现有方法的适用性提出了问题。本文旨在通过新的实验协议来倡导采用连续学习方法，以在该领域取得突破。

持续学习是否为现实世界的挑战做好准备？