Generating Instance-level Prompts for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning

We introduce Domain-Adaptive Prompt (DAP), a novel method for continual learning using Vision Transformers (ViT). Prompt-based continual learning has recently gained attention due to its rehearsal-free nature. Currently, the prompt pool, which is suggested by prompt-based continual learning, is key to effectively exploiting the frozen pretrained ViT backbone in a sequence of tasks. However, we observe that the use of a prompt pool creates a domain scalability problem between pre-training and continual learning. This problem arises due to the inherent encoding of group-level instructions within the prompt pool. To address this problem, we propose DAP, a pool-free approach that generates a suitable prompt in an instance-level manner at inference time. We optimize an adaptive prompt generator that creates instance-specific fine-grained instructions required for each input, enabling enhanced model plasticity and reduced forgetting. Our experiments on seven datasets with varying degrees of domain similarity to Im-ageNet demonstrate the superiority of DAP over state-ofthe-art prompt-based methods. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/naver-ai/dap-cl .