Trust Region Continual Learning as an Implicit Meta-Learner

arXiv:2602.02417v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Continual learning aims to acquire tasks sequentially without catastrophic forgetting, yet standard strategies face a core tradeoff: regularization-based methods (e.g., EWC) can overconstrain updates when task optima are weakly overlapping, while replay-based methods can retain performance but drift due to imperfect replay. We study a hybrid perspective: \emph{trust region continual learning} that combines generative replay with a Fisher-metric trust region constraint. We show that, under local approximations, the resulting update admits a Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) interpretation with a single implicit inner step: replay supplies an old-task gradient signal (query-like), while the Fisher-weighted penalty provides efficient offline curvature shaping (support-like). This yields an emergent meta-learning property in continual learning: the model becomes an initialization that rapidly \emph{re-converges} to prior task optima after each task transition, without explicitly optimizing a bilevel objective that couples inner adaptation with outer meta-updates. Empirically, on task-incremental diffusion image generation and continual diffusion-policy control, trust region continual learning achieves the best final performance and retention, and accelerates early-task recovery compared with EWC, replay, and continual meta-learning baselines.