# Online Versatile Incremental Learning: Towards Class and Domain-Agnostic Adaptation at Any Time

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36442 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.36442/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion and flow policies for robotics, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 26 of its 42 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion and flow policies for robotics](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-and-flow-policies-for-robotics/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [Experience Replay for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.11682/) (2018)
- [Learning to Prompt for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08654/) (2021)
- [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)
- [CORe50: a New Dataset and Benchmark for Continuous Object Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.03550/) (2017)
- [Rainbow Memory: Continual Learning with a Memory of Diverse Samples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.17230/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10956/) (2020)
- [S-Prompts Learning with Pre-trained Transformers: An Occam's Razor for Domain Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12819/) (2022)
- [SLCA: Slow Learner with Classifier Alignment for Continual Learning on a Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05118/) (2023)
- [Supervised Contrastive Replay: Revisiting the Nearest Class Mean Classifier in Online Class-Incremental Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13885/) (2021)
- [A Unified Continual Learning Framework with General Parameter-Efficient Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10070/) (2023)
- [Efficient Parameter-free Clustering Using First Neighbor Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.11266/) (2019)
- [The CLEAR Benchmark: Continual LEArning on Real-World Imagery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.06289/) (2022)
- [Online Continual Learning on Class Incremental Blurry Task Configuration with Anytime Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.10031/) (2021)
- [Continual Adaptation of Visual Representations via Domain Randomization and Meta-learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.04324/) (2020)
- [Online Prototype Learning for Online Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.00301/) (2023)
- [Pre-trained Vision and Language Transformers Are Few-Shot Incremental Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02117/) (2024)
- [Online Class Incremental Learning on Stochastic Blurry Task Boundary via Mask and Visual Prompt Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09303/) (2023)
- [CBA: Improving Online Continual Learning via Continual Bias Adaptor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.06925/) (2023)
- [Dual Consolidation for Pre-Trained Model-Based Domain-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00911/) (2024)
- [Prediction Error-based Classification for Class-Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18806/) (2023)
- [Versatile Incremental Learning: Towards Class and Domain-Agnostic Incremental Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.10956/) (2024)
- [Enhancing Online Continual Learning with Plug-and-Play State Space Model and Class-Conditional Mixture of Discretization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18177/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Continual learning enables vision systems to adapt to ever-changing data distributions. Despite significant advances, existing approaches fail to capture continuous and concurrent shifts in classes and domains, a critical capability for real-world deployment. This work introduces Online VIL (Online Versatile Incremental Learning), a novel scenario where class concepts and visual domains evolve simultaneously online without explicit boundaries. To better adapt to the challenges of such dynamic environments that more closely resemble real-world conditions, we propose a novel framework TopFlow, Topology preservation with Flow matching representation that contains two complementary mechanisms: Domain-agnostic Flow Matching (DFM) and Global Topology Preservation (GTP). DFM guides the model to have domain-agnostic representations by integrating the geodesic flow kernel into contrastive learning. In contrast, GTP maintains the global structure of the feature space without explicitly storing past examples. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that TopFlow effectively addresses the limitations of existing methods within the Online VIL scenario, achieving state-of-the-art performance in challenging Online VIL. The proposed methods suggest potential directions for building continual learning systems in realistic dynamic environments. Our implementation code is available at https://github.com/KU-VGI/Online-VIL.