Paper Detail

SPACE-LoRA: Allocating Activation-Subspace Protection for Continual Learning

Seunghyun Yoo, Kiseok Kim, Hyeontae Joo, Junyeop Bang, Hwangnam Kim

arxiv Score 37.0

Published 2026-09-28 · First seen 2026-10-02

Research Track A

Abstract

This study addresses the catastrophic forgetting problem that occurs when sequentially learning successive tasks using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) from a lifelong learning perspective. While existing approaches have primarily constrained parameter updates or learning subspaces to reduce interference with past knowledge, they have not fully considered additive interference. This occurs when a newly added residual adapter on top of a fixed past model generates non-zero responses along input directions important for old tasks, thereby altering previous predictions. To this end, we propose Subspace Protection with Allocated Capacity for Efficient Continual Adaptation (SPACE-LoRA). SPACE-LoRA directly suppresses the responses of the new residual branch along input activation directions that are important for old tasks and adaptively determines the protection coverage for each module based on past-task sensitivity estimated via a common Fisher sensitivity-based coverage target. Under a fixed LoRA rank, this approach adaptively adjusts module-specific protection coverage while suppressing interference along input directions sensitive to old tasks. We assess the effectiveness of activation-subspace protection in mitigating catastrophic forgetting and examine the role of sensitivity-guided protection in continual learning across diverse tasks. Code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/SPACE-LoRA-7864.

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BibTeX

@article{yoo2026space,
  title = {SPACE-LoRA: Allocating Activation-Subspace Protection for Continual Learning},
  author = {Seunghyun Yoo and Kiseok Kim and Hyeontae Joo and Junyeop Bang and Hwangnam Kim},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {This study addresses the catastrophic forgetting problem that occurs when sequentially learning successive tasks using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) from a lifelong learning perspective. While existing approaches have primarily constrained parameter updates or learning subspaces to reduce interference with past knowledge, they have not fully considered additive interference. This occurs when a newly added residual adapter on top of a fixed past model generates non-zero responses along input directi},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.34453},
  keywords = {cs.LG, cs.AI},
  eprint = {2609.34453},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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