Rethinking Continual Learning Through Self-Adaptive Learning

Abstract

Continual learning has made significant progress toward enabling adaptive machine learning under evolving environments, yet real-world deployment increasingly exposes systems to persistent harsh conditions, including distributional shifts, feature evolution, delayed or scarce supervision, imbalance, noise, and recurring or novel classes. While prior research has largely addressed these challenges in isolation, growing environmental complexity motivates a broader rethinking of continual adaptation as a self-regulating process rather than solely a parameter update problem. Building upon the emerging framework of Self-Adaptive Learning (SAL), this perspective explores how learning systems may progress beyond reactive adaptation toward autonomous recognition, policy selection, and context-sensitive regulation of learning behavior under persistent uncertainty. Rather than proposing a specific algorithmic solution, we position SAL as a conceptual systems framework for organizing future research on resilient, long-lived machine learning systems. We discuss key implications for deployment robustness, evaluation, safety, and adaptive governance, while outlining major open challenges in developing practical self-regulating learners. By strengthening SAL as a forward-looking framework, this work aims to advance the broader conversation on machine learning systems capable of sustained autonomy in dynamic real-world environments.