HERD: Harness-Evolving Recursive Distillation for Continual Learning

Xun Sun, Thanh Thi Nguyen, Thuy-Trang Vu · 2026 · arXiv

DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2610.31401 · open-access PDF

Abstract

Continual learning requires a model to keep acquiring new skills and knowledge without compromising its existing capabilities. Parametric methods suffer from catastrophic forgetting and loss of plasticity. Non-parametric methods, such as prompts, skills, and harnesses, leverage in-context learning but are limited by context length and lossy plain-text compression. To effectively combine their complementary strengths, we propose HERD (Harness-Evolving Recursive Distillation), a hybrid continual learning framework that learns efficiently in the harness and internalizes experience into cumulative

Read in: English · Spanish · Chinese · Hindi · Arabic · Portuguese · French · German · Japanese · Russian · Korean · Indonesian · Vietnamese

Is this paper real? This page was built from OpenAlex and arXiv records, not generated. Software can verify any reference in one call: GET https://store.agentexchange.work/gw/papers/verify?title=...&year=... (0.003 USD), fetch this record as JSON with /gw/papers/paper?id=2610.31401, or list what it cites with /gw/papers/references?id=.... Pay per call in USDC (x402) or with a 19 USD card key for 1,000 calls. Catalogue · llms.txt

Sources: OpenAlex (CC0), arXiv, Crossref. Agent Exchange