# Enhancing Plasticity for First Session Adaptation Continual Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11482 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11482/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 65 of its 91 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 65)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Parameter-Efficient Transfer Learning for NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.00751/) (2019)
- [Benchmarking Neural Network Robustness to Common Corruptions and Perturbations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.12261/) (2019)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12119/) (2022)
- [Natural Adversarial Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.07174/) (2019)
- [Progressive Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04671/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Memory Aware Synapses: Learning what (not) to forget](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09601/) (2017)
- [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)
- [PackNet: Adding Multiple Tasks to a Single Network by Iterative Pruning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.05769/) (2017)
- [Riemannian Walk for Incremental Learning: Understanding Forgetting and Intransigence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10112/) (2018)
- [Fine-Tuning can Distort Pretrained Features and Underperform Out-of-Distribution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10054/) (2022)
- [AdaptFormer: Adapting Vision Transformers for Scalable Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13535/) (2022)
- [DualPrompt: Complementary Prompting for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04799/) (2022)
- [ImageNet-21K Pretraining for the Masses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.10972/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09536/) (2018)
- [Continual Test-Time Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13591/) (2022)
- [Progress & Compress: A scalable framework for continual learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06370/) (2018)
- [Efficient Test-Time Model Adaptation without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02610/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Premonition: Using Generative Models to Preempt Future Data Changes in Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07356/) (2024)
- [Restoring Forgotten Knowledge in Non-Exemplar Class Incremental Learning through Test-Time Semantic Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.16793/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The integration of large pre-trained models (PTMs) into Class-Incremental Learning (CIL) has facilitated the development of computationally efficient strategies such as First-Session Adaptation (FSA), which fine-tunes the model solely on the first task while keeping it frozen for subsequent tasks. Although effective in homogeneous task sequences, these approaches struggle when faced with the heterogeneity of real-world task distributions. We introduce Plasticity-Enhanced Test-Time Adaptation in Class-Incremental Learning (PLASTIC), a method that reinstates plasticity in CIL while preserving model stability. PLASTIC leverages Test-Time Adaptation (TTA) by dynamically fine-tuning LayerNorm parameters on unlabeled test data, enabling adaptability to evolving tasks and improving robustness against data corruption. To prevent TTA-induced model divergence and maintain stable learning across tasks, we introduce a teacher-student distillation framework, ensuring that adaptation remains controlled and generalizable. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that PLASTIC consistently outperforms both conventional and state-of-the-art PTM-based CIL approaches, while also exhibiting inherent robustness to data corruptions. Code is available at: https://github.com/IemProg/PLASTIC.