# Exemplar-Free Continual Transformer with Convolutions

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.11357 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11357/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 64 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 48)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Fashion-MNIST: a Novel Image Dataset for Benchmarking Machine Learning Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.07747/) (2017)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08840/) (2017)
- [Rethinking Attention with Performers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.14794/) (2020)
- [Continual Lifelong Learning with Neural Networks: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07569/) (2018)
- [Continual Learning with Deep Generative Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08690/) (2017)
- [Experience Replay for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11682/) (2018)
- [Learning to Prompt for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08654/) (2021)
- [Dark Experience for General Continual Learning: a Strong, Simple Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07211/) (2020)
- [Going deeper with Image Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17239/) (2021)
- [Lifelong Learning with Dynamically Expandable Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.01547/) (2017)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting with hard attention to the task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01423/) (2018)
- [Do Vision Transformers See Like Convolutional Neural Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.08810/) (2021)
- [Universal Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03819/) (2018)
- [DualPrompt: Complementary Prompting for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04799/) (2022)
- [Three scenarios for continual learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07734/) (2019)
- [ConViT: Improving Vision Transformers with Soft Convolutional Inductive Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10697/) (2021)
- [Expert Gate: Lifelong Learning with a Network of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.06194/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Convolutional Prompting meets Language Models for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.20317/) (2024)
- [One VLM to Keep it Learning: Generation and Balancing for Data-free Continual Visual Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02210/) (2024)
- [ConSense: Continually Sensing Human Activity with WiFi via Growing and Picking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17483/) (2025)
- [Efficient Expansion and Gradient Based Task Inference for Replay Free Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.01188/) (2023)
- [WECAR: An End-Edge Collaborative Inference and Training Framework for WiFi-Based Continuous Human Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07669/) (2025)
- [Revisiting Prototype Rehearsal for Exemplar-Free Continual Learning: Manifold-Aware Boundary Sampling with Adaptive Class-Balanced Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.05695/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Continual Learning (CL) involves training a machine learning model in a sequential manner to learn new information while retaining previously learned tasks without the presence of previous training data. Although there has been significant interest in CL, most recent CL approaches in computer vision have focused on convolutional architectures only. However, with the recent success of vision transformers, there is a need to explore their potential for CL. Although there have been some recent CL approaches for vision transformers, they either store training instances of previous tasks or require a task identifier during test time, which can be limiting. This paper proposes a new exemplar-free approach for class/task incremental learning called ConTraCon, which does not require task-id to be explicitly present during inference and avoids the need for storing previous training instances. The proposed approach leverages the transformer architecture and involves re-weighting the key, query, and value weights of the multi-head self-attention layers of a transformer trained on a similar task. The re-weighting is done using convolution, which enables the approach to maintain low parameter requirements per task. Additionally, an image augmentation-based entropic task identification approach is used to predict tasks without requiring task-ids during inference. Experiments on four benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms several competitive approaches while requiring fewer parameters.