Vector Quantization Prompting for Continual Learning

Continual learning requires to overcome catastrophic forgetting when training a single model on a sequence of tasks. Recent top-performing approaches are prompt-based methods that utilize a set of learnable parameters (i.e., prompts) to encode task knowledge, from which appropriate ones are selected to guide the fixed pre-trained model in generating features tailored to a certain task. However, existing methods rely on predicting prompt identities for prompt selection, where the identity prediction process cannot be optimized with task loss. This limitation leads to sub-optimal prompt selection and inadequate adaptation of pre-trained features for a specific task. Previous efforts have tried to address this by directly generating prompts from input queries instead of selecting from a set of candidates. However, these prompts are continuous, which lack sufficient abstraction for task knowledge representation, making them less effective for continual learning. To address these challenges, we propose VQ-Prompt, a prompt-based continual learning method that incorporates Vector Quantization (VQ) into end-to-end training of a set of discrete prompts. In this way, VQ-Prompt can optimize the prompt selection process with task loss and meanwhile achieve effective abstraction of task knowledge for continual learning. Extensive experiments show that VQ-Prompt outperforms state-of-the-art continual learning methods across a variety of benchmarks under the challenging class-incremental setting.