Task-Free Continual Learning via Online Discrepancy Distance Learninge

NeurIPS 2022
Fei Ye
Adrian G. Bors

Department of Computer Science, University of York, York, YO10 5GH, UK, fy689,adrian.bors@york.ac.uk

[Paper]
[GitHub]
The structure of the proposed model consisted of k components where each component has a classifier and VAE model. We only update the current component (k) in the training process. To check the model expansion, we generate the images for each component using the associated VAE model. Then those generated samples are used to estimate the discrepancy distance between the memory buffer and each previously learnt component. If the discrepancy distance is large, we expand the network architecture, otherwise, we perform the sample selection.

Abstract

Learning from non-stationary data streams, also called Task-Free Continual Learning (TFCL) remains challenging due to the absence of explicit task information. Although there are some recently proposed algorithms for TFCL, these methods lack theoretical guarantees. Moreover, there are no theoretical studies for forgetting analysis of TFCL. This paper develops a new theoretical analysis framework that derives generalization bounds based on the discrepancy distance between the visited samples and the entire information made available for training the model. This analysis provides new insights into the forgetting behaviour in classification tasks. Inspired by this theoretical model, we propose a new approach enabled with the dynamic component expansion mechanism for a mixture model, namely Online Discrepancy Distance Learning (ODDL). ODDL estimates the discrepancy between the current memory and the already accumulated knowledge as the expansion signal to ensure a compact network architecture with optimal performance. We then propose a new sample selection approach that selectively stores the samples into the memory buffer through the discrepancy-based measure, further improving the performance. We perform several TFCL experiments with the proposed methodology, which demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves the state of the art performance.


Talk


[Slides]

Code


 [GitHub]


Paper and Supplementary Material

Fei Ye and Adrian G. Bors
Creative and Descriptive Paper Title.
In Conference, 20XX.
(hosted on ArXiv)


[Bibtex]


Acknowledgements

This template was originally made by Phillip Isola and Richard Zhang for a colorful ECCV project; the code can be found here.