Socialized Division and Collaboration: Rethinking Class-Incremental Learning under Optimization Conflicts· 社会分工与协作:重思优化冲突下的类增量学习
Class-incremental learning is commonly instantiated as a single-model paradigm, where a unified model sequentially adapts to an unbounded stream of sessions. While effective under mild distributional shifts, this formulation becomes strained when successive sessions induce incompatible optimization directions, leading to destructive interference and catastrophic forgetting. We argue that such forgetting reflects a structural limitation of enforcing heterogeneous learning dynamics within a single parameter space. Motivated by social solidarity theory, we propose Socialized Division and Collaboration (SDC) as a reformulation of continual learning that decomposes session learning across specialized models in response to optimization conflicts, while enabling coordinated collaboration. To supp