Incremental learning (IL) suffers from catastrophic forgetting of old tasks when learning new tasks. This can be addressed by replaying previous tasks' data stored in a memory, which however is usually prone to size limits and privacy leakage. Recent studies store only class centroids as prototypes and augment them with Gaussian noises to create synthetic data for replay. However, they cannot effectively avoid class interference near their margins that leads to forgetting. Moreover, the injected noises distort the rich structure between real data and prototypes, hence even detrimental to IL. In this paper, we propose YONO that You Only Need to replay One condensed prototype per class, which for the first time can even outperform memory-costly exemplar-replay methods. To this end, we develop a novel prototype learning method that (1) searches for more representative prototypes in high-density regions by an attentional mean-shift algorithm and (2) moves samples in each class to their prototype to form a compact cluster distant from other classes. Thereby, the class margins are maximized, which effectively reduces interference causing future forgetting. In addition, we extend YONO to YONO+, which creates synthetic replay data by random sampling in the neighborhood of each prototype in the representation space. We show that the synthetic data can further improve YONO. Extensive experiments on IL benchmarks demonstrate the advantages of YONO/YONO+ over existing IL methods in terms of both accuracy and forgetting.
In continual learning, model needs to continually learn a feature extractor and classifier on a sequence of tasks. This paper focuses on how to learn a classifier based on a pretrained feature extractor under continual learning setting. We present an probabilistic analysis that the failure of vanilla experience replay (ER) comes from unnecessary re-learning of previous tasks and incompetence to distinguish current task from the previous ones, which is the cause of knowledge degradation and prediction bias. To overcome these weaknesses, we propose a novel replay strategy task-aware experience r…
Indian Institute of Technology Bombay（印度理工学院孟买分校）；Goethe University Frankfurt（法兰克福歌德大学）
We tackle the novel problem of incremental unsupervised domain adaptation (IDA) in this paper. We assume that a labeled source domain and different unlabeled target domains are incrementally observed with the constraint that data corresponding to the current domain is only available at a time. The goal is to preserve the accuracies for all the past domains while generalizing well for the current domain. The IDA setup suffers due to the abrupt differences among the domains and the unavailability of past data including the source domain. Inspired by the notion of generative feature replay, we pr…
Augmented Box Replay: Overcoming Foreground Shift for Incremental Object Detection
Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院沈阳自动化研究所）；Institutes for Robotics and Intelligent Manufacturing, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院机器人与智能制造创新研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Nankai University（南开大学）；Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学）
This paper proposes two novel knowledge transfer techniques for class-incremental learning (CIL). First, we propose data-free generative replay (DF-GR) to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in CIL by using synthetic samples from a generative model. In the conventional generative replay, the generative model is pre-trained for old data and shared in extra memory for later incremental learning. In our proposed DF-GR, we train a generative model from scratch without using any training data, based on the pre-trained classification model from the past, so we curtail the cost of sharing pre-trained ge…
In class-incremental learning, the objective is to learn a number of classes sequentially without having access to the whole training data. However, due to a problem known as catastrophic forgetting, neural networks suffer substantial performance drop in such settings. The problem is often approached by experience replay, a method which stores a limited number of samples to be replayed in future steps to reduce forgetting of the learned classes. When using a pretrained network as a feature extractor, we show that instead of training a single classifier incrementally, it is better to train a nu…
Computer Vision Center, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona（巴塞罗那自治大学计算机视觉中心）；Media Integration and Communication Center, University of Florence（佛罗伦萨大学媒体集成与传播中心）；Huawei Kirin Solution（华为麒麟解决方案）
Humans are capable of learning new tasks without forgetting previous ones, while neural networks fail due to catastrophic forgetting between new and previously-learned tasks. We consider a class-incremental setting which means that the task-ID is unknown at inference time. The imbalance between old and new classes typically results in a bias of the network towards the newest ones. This imbalance problem can either be addressed by storing exemplars from previous tasks, or by using image replay methods. However, the latter can only be applied to toy datasets since image generation for complex da…
Class-wise Balancing Data Replay for Federated Class-Incremental Learning
School of Software, Shandong University（山东大学软件学院）；College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机与数据科学学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of British Columbia（不列颠哥伦比亚大学电气与计算机工程系）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；LG AI Research（LG人工智能研究院）
Online class-incremental continual learning (CL) studies the problem of learning new classes continually from an online non-stationary data stream, intending to adapt to new data while mitigating catastrophic forgetting. While memory replay has shown promising results, the recency bias in online learning caused by the commonly used Softmax classifier remains an unsolved challenge. Although the Nearest-Class-Mean (NCM) classifier is significantly undervalued in the CL community, we demonstrate that it is a simple yet effective substitute for the Softmax classifier. It addresses the recency bias…
Modern machine learning systems need to be able to cope with constantly arriving and changing data. Two main areas of research dealing with such scenarios are continual learning and data stream mining. Continual learning focuses on accumulating knowledge and avoiding forgetting, assuming information once learned should be stored. Data stream mining focuses on adaptation to concept drift and discarding outdated information, assuming that only the most recent data is relevant. While these two areas are mainly being developed in separation, they offer complementary views on the problem of learnin…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Samsung Research America（三星美国研究院）
Modern computer vision applications suffer from catastrophic forgetting when incrementally learning new concepts over time. The most successful approaches to alleviate this forgetting require extensive replay of previously seen data, which is problematic when memory constraints or data legality concerns exist. In this work, we consider the high-impact problem of Data-Free Class-Incremental Learning (DFCIL), where an incremental learning agent must learn new concepts over time without storing generators or training data from past tasks. One approach for DFCIL is to replay synthetic images produ…
University of Bologna（博洛尼亚大学）；University of Pisa（比萨大学）
Learning continually is a key aspect of intelligence and a necessary ability to solve many real-life problems. One of the most effective strategies to control catastrophic forgetting, the Achilles' heel of continual learning, is storing part of the old data and replaying them interleaved with new experiences (also known as the replay approach). Generative replay, which is using generative models to provide replay patterns on demand, is particularly intriguing, however, it was shown to be effective mainly under simplified assumptions, such as simple scenarios and low-dimensional data. In this p…
Towards Robust Incremental Learning under Ambiguous Supervision
School of Software Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学软件学院）；Hangzhou High-Tech Zone (Binjiang) Institute of Blockchain and Data Security（杭州高新区（滨江）区块链与数据安全研究院）；College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University（浙江大学计算机科学与技术学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University（东南大学计算机科学与工程学院）
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；LG AI Research（LG人工智能研究院）
As image-based deep learning becomes pervasive on every device, from cell phones to smart watches, there is a growing need to develop methods that continually learn from data while minimizing memory footprint and power consumption. While memory replay techniques have shown exceptional promise for this task of continual learning, the best method for selecting which buffered images to replay is still an open question. In this paper, we specifically focus on the online class-incremental setting where a model needs to learn new classes continually from an online data stream. To this end, we contri…
Continual learning requires the model to maintain the learned knowledge while learning from a non-i.i.d data stream continually. Due to the single-pass training setting, online continual learning is very challenging, but it is closer to the real-world scenarios where quick adaptation to new data is appealing. In this paper, we focus on online class-incremental learning setting in which new classes emerge over time. Almost all existing methods are replay-based with a softmax classifier. However, the inherent logits bias problem in the softmax classifier is a main cause of catastrophic forgettin…
Rochester Institute of Technology（罗切斯特理工学院）；Adobe Research（Adobe研究院）；Paige；Cornell Tech（康奈尔科技校区）
People learn throughout life. However, incrementally updating conventional neural networks leads to catastrophic forgetting. A common remedy is replay, which is inspired by how the brain consolidates memory. Replay involves fine-tuning a network on a mixture of new and old instances. While there is neuroscientific evidence that the brain replays compressed memories, existing methods for convolutional networks replay raw images. Here, we propose REMIND, a brain-inspired approach that enables efficient replay with compressed representations. REMIND is trained in an online manner, meaning it lear…
Replay-and-Forget-Free Graph Class-Incremental Learning: A Task Profiling and Prompting Approach
AAII, University of Technology Sydney（澳大利亚悉尼科技大学AAII）；School of Computing and Information Systems, Singapore Management University（新加坡管理大学计算与信息系统学院）；Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago（美国伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校计算机科学系）
IIT Kanpur（印度理工学院坎普尔分校）；Duke University（杜克大学）；Verisk Analytics（威斯科分析公司）；University of Bath（巴斯大学）
A wide variety of methods have been developed to enable lifelong learning in conventional deep neural networks. However, to succeed, these methods require a `batch' of samples to be available and visited multiple times during training. While this works well in a static setting, these methods continue to suffer in a more realistic situation where data arrives in \emph{online streaming manner}. We empirically demonstrate that the performance of current approaches degrades if the input is obtained as a stream of data with the following restrictions: $(i)$ each instance comes one at a time and can…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Mila--Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute（米拉-魁北克人工智能研究所）；Adobe Research（奥多比研究院）
Continual learning consists in incrementally training a model on a sequence of datasets and testing on the union of all datasets. In this paper, we examine continual learning for the problem of sound classification, in which we wish to refine already trained models to learn new sound classes. In practice one does not want to maintain all past training data and retrain from scratch, but naively updating a model with new data(sets) results in a degradation of already learned tasks, which is referred to as "catastrophic forgetting." We develop a generative replay procedure for generating training…
Recent work studies the supervised online continual learning setting where a learner receives a stream of data whose class distribution changes over time. Distinct from other continual learning settings the learner is presented new samples only once and must distinguish between all seen classes. A number of successful methods in this setting focus on storing and replaying a subset of samples alongside incoming data in a computationally efficient manner. One recent proposal ER-AML achieved strong performance in this setting by applying an asymmetric loss based on contrastive learning to the inc…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Tsinghua-Peking Center for Life Sciences（清华-北大生命科学联合中心）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；Renmin University of China（中国人民大学）
Continual learning needs to overcome catastrophic forgetting of the past. Memory replay of representative old training samples has been shown as an effective solution, and achieves the state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. However, existing work is mainly built on a small memory buffer containing a few original data, which cannot fully characterize the old data distribution. In this work, we propose memory replay with data compression (MRDC) to reduce the storage cost of old training samples and thus increase their amount that can be stored in the memory buffer. Observing that the trade-off bet…
The University of Modena and Reggio Emilia（摩德纳-雷焦艾米利亚大学）
The staple of human intelligence is the capability of acquiring knowledge in a continuous fashion. In stark contrast, Deep Networks forget catastrophically and, for this reason, the sub-field of Class-Incremental Continual Learning fosters methods that learn a sequence of tasks incrementally, blending sequentially-gained knowledge into a comprehensive prediction. This work aims at assessing and overcoming the pitfalls of our previous proposal Dark Experience Replay (DER), a simple and effective approach that combines rehearsal and Knowledge Distillation. Inspired by the way our minds constantl…
