Foundational vision-language models have shown impressive performance on various downstream tasks. Yet, there is still a pressing need to update these models later as new tasks or domains become available. Ongoing Continual Learning (CL) research provides techniques to overcome catastrophic forgetting of previous information when new knowledge is acquired. To date, CL techniques focus only on the supervised training sessions. This results in significant forgetting yielding inferior performance to even the prior model zero shot performance. In this work, we argue that test-time data hold great information that can be leveraged in a self supervised manner to refresh the model's memory of previous learned tasks and hence greatly reduce forgetting at no extra labelling cost. We study how unsupervised data can be employed online to improve models' performance on prior tasks upon encountering representative samples. We propose a simple yet effective student-teacher model with gradient based sparse parameters updates and show significant performance improvements and reduction in forgetting, which could alleviate the role of an offline episodic memory/experience replay buffer.

通过利用测试数据进行自我监督，以减少遗忘，并提出了基于梯度稀疏参数更新的简单但有效的学生-教师模型，进而显著改善了模型的性能和减少了遗忘。

在连续学习中利用测试时间数据控制遗忘