# Online Prototype Learning for Online Continual Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.00301 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00301/

## Key facts

- Cited by 53 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Distillation for continual learning, one of 12 directions in Knowledge distillation.
- Builds on 40 of its 56 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2023.

## Placed in

- Knowledge distillation / [Distillation for continual learning](https://mlsanity.com/distill/distillation-for-continual-learning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [mixup: Beyond Empirical Risk Minimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.09412/) (2017)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Shortcut Learning in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07780/) (2020)
- [Continual Lifelong Learning with Neural Networks: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07569/) (2018)
- [Memory Aware Synapses: Learning what (not) to forget](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09601/) (2017)
- [Efficient Lifelong Learning with A-GEM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00420/) (2018)
- [Grad-CAM++: Improved Visual Explanations for Deep Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11063/) (2017)
- [Dark Experience for General Continual Learning: a Strong, Simple Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07211/) (2020)
- [Riemannian Walk for Incremental Learning: Understanding Forgetting and Intransigence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10112/) (2018)
- [An Empirical Investigation of Catastrophic Forgetting in Gradient-Based Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6211/) (2013)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting with hard attention to the task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01423/) (2018)
- [Prototypical Contrastive Learning of Unsupervised Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04966/) (2020)
- [Gradient based sample selection for online continual learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08671/) (2019)
- [Class-incremental learning: survey and performance evaluation on image classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15277/) (2020)
- [Online Continual Learning with Maximally Interfered Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04742/) (2019)
- [PathNet: Evolution Channels Gradient Descent in Super Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.08734/) (2017)
- [Online Continual Learning in Image Classification: An Empirical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10423/) (2021)
- [Co2L: Contrastive Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14413/) (2021)
- [Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting by Incremental Moment Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.08475/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Improving Plasticity in Online Continual Learning via Collaborative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00600/) (2023)
- [Orchestrate Latent Expertise: Advancing Online Continual Learning with Multi-Level Supervision and Reverse Self-Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00417/) (2024)
- [F-OAL: Forward-only Online Analytic Learning with Fast Training and Low Memory Footprint in Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.15751/) (2024)
- [Forgetting, Ignorance or Myopia: Revisiting Key Challenges in Online Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.19245/) (2024)
- [Learning from One Continuous Video Stream](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00598/) (2023)
- [Random Representations Outperform Online Continually Learned Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08823/) (2024)
- [ProtoDepth: Unsupervised Continual Depth Completion with Prototypes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.12745/) (2025)
- [Reshaping the Online Data Buffering and Organizing Mechanism for Continual Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.09367/) (2024)
- [EvolveDirector: Approaching Advanced Text-to-Image Generation with Large Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07133/) (2024)
- [Learning from Streaming Video with Orthogonal Gradients](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01961/) (2025)
- [DELTA: Decoupling Long-Tailed Online Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04476/) (2024)
- [Online Curvature-Aware Replay: Leveraging mathbf2nd Order Information for Online Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01866/) (2025)
- [SynMotion: Semantic-Visual Adaptation for Motion Customized Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23690/) (2025)
- [Enhancing Online Continual Learning with Plug-and-Play State Space Model and Class-Conditional Mixture of Discretization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18177/) (2024)
- [Memory Storyboard: Leveraging Temporal Segmentation for Streaming Self-Supervised Learning from Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12254/) (2025)
- [Label Delay in Online Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00923/) (2023)
- [Dealing with Synthetic Data Contamination in Online Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.13852/) (2024)
- [Diverse Prototypical Ensembles Improve Robustness to Subpopulation Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23027/) (2025)
- [Harnessing Neural Unit Dynamics for Effective and Scalable Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02428/) (2024)
- [Self-Regulated Neurogenesis for Online Data-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14684/) (2024)
- [FedSC: Federated Learning with Semantic-Aware Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21012/) (2025)
- [Cross-modal Prompting for Balanced Incomplete Multi-modal Emotion Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.11239/) (2025)
- [HPCR: Holistic Proxy-based Contrastive Replay for Online Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.15038/) (2023)
- [Constructing Enhanced Mutual Information for Online Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18526/) (2024)
- [Hierarchy-Consistent Learning and Adaptive Loss Balancing for Hierarchical Multi-Label Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13452/) (2025)
- [Density Distribution-based Learning Framework for Addressing Online Continual Learning Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13623/) (2023)
- [Decision Boundary-aware Knowledge Consolidation Generates Better Instance-Incremental Learner](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03065/) (2024)
- [Augmented Contrastive Clustering with Uncertainty-Aware Prototyping for Time Series Test Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.01472/) (2025)
- [Ancestral Mamba: Enhancing Selective Discriminant Space Model with Online Visual Prototype Learning for Efficient and Robust Discriminant Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22729/) (2025)
- [Improving Generalization in Heterogeneous Federated Continual Learning via Spatio-Temporal Gradient Matching with Prototypical Coreset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12031/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Online continual learning (CL) studies the problem of learning continuously from a single-pass data stream while adapting to new data and mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Recently, by storing a small subset of old data, replay-based methods have shown promising performance. Unlike previous methods that focus on sample storage or knowledge distillation against catastrophic forgetting, this paper aims to understand why the online learning models fail to generalize well from a new perspective of shortcut learning. We identify shortcut learning as the key limiting factor for online CL, where the learned features may be biased, not generalizable to new tasks, and may have an adverse impact on knowledge distillation. To tackle this issue, we present the online prototype learning (OnPro) framework for online CL. First, we propose online prototype equilibrium to learn representative features against shortcut learning and discriminative features to avoid class confusion, ultimately achieving an equilibrium status that separates all seen classes well while learning new classes. Second, with the feedback of online prototypes, we devise a novel adaptive prototypical feedback mechanism to sense the classes that are easily misclassified and then enhance their boundaries. Extensive experimental results on widely-used benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of OnPro over the state-of-the-art baseline methods. Source code is available at https://github.com/weilllllls/OnPro.