# ProTPS: Prototype-Guided Text Prompt Selection for Continual Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.01116 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.01116/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 44 of its 67 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 44)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Grad-CAM: Visual Explanations from Deep Networks via Gradient-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.02391/) (2016)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [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)
- [Learning to Prompt for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01134/) (2021)
- [Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08840/) (2017)
- [Unsupervised Feature Learning via Non-Parametric Instance-level Discrimination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.01978/) (2018)
- [Learning deep representations by mutual information estimation and maximization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06670/) (2018)
- [Learning to Prompt for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08654/) (2021)
- [Large Scale Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.13260/) (2019)
- [Large-Scale Long-Tailed Recognition in an Open World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05160/) (2019)
- [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)
- [Data-Efficient Image Recognition with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.09272/) (2019)
- [DualPrompt: Complementary Prompting for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04799/) (2022)
- [End-to-End Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.09536/) (2018)
- [CODA-Prompt: COntinual Decomposed Attention-based Prompting for Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13218/) (2022)
- [PathNet: Evolution Channels Gradient Descent in Super Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1701.08734/) (2017)
- [DER: Dynamically Expandable Representation for Class Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.16788/) (2021)
- [Learn to Grow: A Continual Structure Learning Framework for Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00310/) (2019)
- [DyTox: Transformers for Continual Learning with DYnamic TOken eXpansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.11326/) (2021)
- [CORe50: a New Dataset and Benchmark for Continuous Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03550/) (2017)
- [S-Prompts Learning with Pre-trained Transformers: An Occam's Razor for Domain Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12819/) (2022)
- [Online Continual Learning in Image Classification: An Empirical Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10423/) (2021)
- [Compacting, Picking and Growing for Unforgetting Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.06562/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

For continual learning, text-prompt-based methods leverage text encoders and learnable prompts to encode semantic features for sequentially arrived classes over time. A common challenge encountered by existing works is how to learn unique text prompts, which implicitly carry semantic information of new classes, so that the semantic features of newly arrived classes do not overlap with those of trained classes, thereby mitigating the catastrophic forgetting problem. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach Prototype-guided Text Prompt Selection (ProTPS)'' to intentionally increase the training flexibility thus encouraging the learning of unique text prompts. Specifically, our ProTPS learns class-specific vision prototypes and text prompts. Vision prototypes guide the selection and learning of text prompts for each class. We first evaluate our ProTPS in both class incremental (CI) setting and cross-datasets continual (CDC) learning setting. Because our ProTPS achieves performance close to the upper bounds, we further collect a real-world dataset with 112 marine species collected over a span of six years, named Marine112, to bring new challenges to the community. Marine112 is authentically suited for the class and domain incremental (CDI) learning setting and is under natural long-tail distribution. The results under three settings show that our ProTPS performs favorably against the recent state-of-the-art methods. The implementation code and Marine112 dataset will be released upon the acceptance of our paper.