Online continual learning – Definition & Meaning

Definition of online continual learning

: a continual-learning setting in which a model updates incrementally from a changing stream of examples or interactions, usually seeing each sample or small batch only once and retaining little data for replay
- Online continual learning allowed the household robot to adapt to a new object without retraining from its entire history.
- The OCL benchmark measured whether the model could learn new classes from a stream without forgetting earlier ones.

Origin & history

Online continual learning emerged at the intersection of online learning and continual learning. Surveys and empirical benchmarks established the name during the early 2020s for realistic settings where non-stationary data arrive sequentially and a learner has limited memory and limited opportunities to revisit past samples.

Test yourself

Which of these is the meaning of online continual learning?

Related terms

continual learning an approach in which a machine-learning system learns from a sequence or stream of changing… catastrophic forgetting the abrupt loss of previously learned abilities or knowledge when a neural network is trained… concept drift a change over time in the statistical relationship between a model's inputs and the outcome it… distribution shift a difference between the statistical distribution of the data used to train or evaluate a… reinforcement learning a way of training in which a model tries actions, receives rewards or penalties, and gradually… on-device AI AI that runs directly on a phone, laptop, car, or other device instead of in the cloud, which… world model an AI system that learns how the physical world behaves, such as how objects move and react…

Cite this entry

"Online continual learning." AI Dictionary, Dadgogo, https://dadgogo.com/dictionary/online-continual-learning/. Accessed 12 Oct. 2026.