# Label Delay in Online Continual Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00923 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00923/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 48 of its 72 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Dec 2023.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [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)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [Bootstrap your own latent: A new approach to self-supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.07733/) (2020)
- [Exploring Simple Siamese Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.10566/) (2020)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Visual Features by Contrasting Cluster Assignments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09882/) (2020)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08840/) (2017)
- [Barlow Twins: Self-Supervised Learning via Redundancy Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03230/) (2021)
- [An Empirical Study of Training Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02057/) (2021)
- [VICReg: Variance-Invariance-Covariance Regularization for Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.04906/) (2021)
- [Dark Experience for General Continual Learning: a Strong, Simple Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07211/) (2020)
- [Do We Really Need to Access the Source Data? Source Hypothesis Transfer for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.08546/) (2020)
- [Riemannian Walk for Incremental Learning: Understanding Forgetting and Intransigence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10112/) (2018)
- [Gradient based sample selection for online continual learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08671/) (2019)
- [Continual Test-Time Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13591/) (2022)
- [Efficient Test-Time Model Adaptation without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02610/) (2022)
- [Towards Stable Test-Time Adaptation in Dynamic Wild World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12400/) (2023)
- [Online Continual Learning with Maximally Interfered Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04742/) (2019)
- [A Comprehensive Survey on Test-Time Adaptation under Distribution Shifts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15361/) (2023)
- [Functional Map of the World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07846/) (2017)
- [S4L: Self-Supervised Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.03670/) (2019)
- [With a Little Help from My Friends: Nearest-Neighbor Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14548/) (2021)
- [On Tiny Episodic Memories in Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.10486/) (2019)
- [Whitening for Self-Supervised Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06346/) (2020)
- [A Cookbook of Self-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12210/) (2023)
- [Online Continual Learning in Image Classification: An Empirical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10423/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Ranked Entropy Minimization for Continual Test-Time Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16441/) (2025)
- [Causal Label Recovery in Payment Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.29272/) (2026)
- [DT-GOL: Dual-Track Geometric Online Learning in Nonstationary Environment with Label Delay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22950/) (2026)
- [Age of Learning: Temporal Persistence of Prediction Errors as a Learning Signal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32593/) (2026)
- [PaMIR: Open Benchmark of Public Credit-Default Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.03259/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Online continual learning, the process of training models on streaming data, has gained increasing attention in recent years. However, a critical aspect often overlooked is the label delay, where new data may not be labeled due to slow and costly annotation processes. We introduce a new continual learning framework with explicit modeling of the label delay between data and label streams over time steps. In each step, the framework reveals both unlabeled data from the current time step t and labels delayed with d steps, from the time step t-d. In our extensive experiments amounting to 1060 GPU days, we show that merely augmenting the computational resources is insufficient to tackle this challenge. Our findings underline a notable performance decline when solely relying on labeled data when the label delay becomes significant. More surprisingly, when using state-of-the-art SSL and TTA techniques to utilize the newer, unlabeled data, they fail to surpass the performance of a na"ive method that simply trains on the delayed supervised stream. To this end, we introduce a simple, efficient baseline that rehearses from the labeled memory samples that are most similar to the new unlabeled samples. This method bridges the accuracy gap caused by label delay without significantly increasing computational complexity. We show experimentally that our method is the least affected by the label delay factor and in some cases successfully recovers the accuracy of the non-delayed counterpart. We conduct various ablations and sensitivity experiments, demonstrating the effectiveness of our approach.