# GAP-Prompt: Gated Adaptive Prompting for Efficient Continual Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23782 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.23782/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 42 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 42)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [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)
- [Prefix-Tuning: Optimizing Continuous Prompts for Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00190/) (2021)
- [The Power of Scale for Parameter-Efficient Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08691/) (2021)
- [Categorical Reparameterization with Gumbel-Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.01144/) (2016)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [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)
- [The Concrete Distribution: A Continuous Relaxation of Discrete Random Variables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.00712/) (2016)
- [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)
- [iBOT: Image BERT Pre-Training with Online Tokenizer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07832/) (2021)
- [Riemannian Walk for Incremental Learning: Understanding Forgetting and Intransigence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10112/) (2018)
- [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)
- [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)
- [Gradient based sample selection for online continual learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08671/) (2019)
- [CODA-Prompt: COntinual Decomposed Attention-based Prompting for Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13218/) (2022)
- [S-Prompts Learning with Pre-trained Transformers: An Occam's Razor for Domain Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12819/) (2022)
- [Co2L: Contrastive Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14413/) (2021)
- [InfLoRA: Interference-Free Low-Rank Adaptation for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.00228/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Learning as Deepfakes Evolve: RF-Prompt for Continual Audio Deepfake Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.37586/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Continual learning faces the persistent challenge of catastrophic forgetting, where sequential task updates degrade previously acquired knowledge. While prompt-based methods integrated with pre-trained models offer a compelling solution by freezing the backbone, they often rely on static, task-level prompting strategies that overlook fine-grained intra-task diversity. In this paper, we propose Gated Adaptive Prompting (GAP-Prompt), a novel method that introduces instance-level adaptability to the prompting process. GAP-Prompt consists of three synergistic modules: (1) instance-conditioned gating, which dynamically determines optimal prompt injection layers for each individual image; (2) dynamic knowledge fusion, which performs instance-aware aggregation of current and historical prompts, enabling knowledge integration across tasks; and (3) shared prompt distillation, which anchors foundational knowledge in early shared layers to mitigate forgetting. Extensive evaluations on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-R, and CUB-200 benchmarks demonstrate that GAP-Prompt consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance. Notably, on the fine-grained CUB-200 dataset, GAP-Prompt reaches 87.29% accuracy, approaching the joint training upper bound (88.00%) and outperforming existing methods by a significant margin.