# Gated Adaptation for Continual Learning in Human Activity Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10046 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10046/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 52 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 8 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [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)
- [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)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Continual Learning: Theory, Method and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00487/) (2023)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting with hard attention to the task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01423/) (2018)
- [DualPrompt: Complementary Prompting for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04799/) (2022)
- [CODA-Prompt: COntinual Decomposed Attention-based Prompting for Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13218/) (2022)
- [Class-Incremental Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.03648/) (2023)
- [Continual Learning with Pre-Trained Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16386/) (2024)
- [Deep Learning for Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition: Overview, Challenges and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.07416/) (2020)
- [Alleviating catastrophic forgetting using context-dependent gating and synaptic stabilization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01569/) (2018)
- [DeepSense: A Unified Deep Learning Framework for Time-Series Mobile Sensing Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01942/) (2016)
- [Continual Learning and Catastrophic Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05175/) (2024)
- [Continual Learning in Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition: an Empirical Benchmark Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09396/) (2021)
- [AttenGluco: Multimodal Transformer-Based Blood Glucose Forecasting on AI-READI Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.09919/) (2025)
- [Reflecting on the State of Rehearsal-free Continual Learning with Pretrained Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09384/) (2024)
- [Lifelong Adaptive Machine Learning for Sensor-based Human Activity Recognition Using Prototypical Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05692/) (2022)
- [Balancing Continual Learning and Fine-tuning for Human Activity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02255/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Wearable sensors in Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems increasingly support applications such as remote health monitoring, elderly care, and smart home automation, all of which rely on robust human activity recognition (HAR). Continual learning systems must balance plasticity (learning new tasks) with stability (retaining prior knowledge), yet AI models often exhibit catastrophic forgetting, where learning new tasks degrades performance on earlier ones. This challenge is especially acute in domain-incremental HAR, where on-device models must adapt to new subjects with distinct movement patterns while maintaining accuracy on prior subjects without transmitting sensitive data to the cloud. We propose a parameter-efficient continual learning framework based on channel-wise gated modulation of frozen pretrained representations. Our key insight is that adaptation should operate through feature selection rather than feature generation: by restricting learned transformations to diagonal scaling of existing features, we preserve the geometry of pretrained representations while enabling subject-specific modulation. We provide a theoretical analysis showing that gating implements a bounded diagonal operator that limits representational drift compared to unconstrained linear transformations. Empirically, freezing the backbone substantially reduces forgetting, and lightweight gates restore lost adaptation capacity, achieving stability and plasticity simultaneously. On PAMAP2 with 8 sequential subjects, our approach reduces forgetting from 39.7% to 16.2% and improves final accuracy from 56.7% to 77.7%, while training less than 2% of parameters. Our method matches or exceeds standard continual learning baselines without replay buffers or task-specific regularization, confirming that structured diagonal operators are effective and efficient under distribution shift.