학술논문

New Insights on Relieving Task-Recency Bias for Online Class Incremental Learning
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol. Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, IEEE Transactions on. 34(5):3451-3464 May, 2024
Subject
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Computing and Processing
Signal Processing and Analysis
Task analysis
Data models
Training
Streaming media
Stability criteria
Predictive models
Circuit stability
Online class incremental learning
revised focal loss
virtual knowledge distillation
Language
ISSN
1051-8215
1558-2205
Abstract
To imitate the ability of keeping learning of human, continual learning which can learn from a never-ending data stream has attracted more interests recently. In all settings, the online class incremental learning (OCIL), where incoming samples from data stream can be used only once, is more challenging and can be encountered more frequently in real world. Actually, all continual learning models face a stability-plasticity dilemma, where the stability means the ability to preserve old knowledge while the plasticity denotes the ability to incorporate new knowledge. Although replay-based methods have shown exceptional promise, most of them concentrate on the strategy for updating and retrieving memory to keep stability at the expense of plasticity. To strike a preferable trade-off between stability and plasticity, we propose an Adaptive Focus Shifting algorithm (AFS), which dynamically adjusts focus to ambiguous samples and non-target logits in model learning. Through a deep analysis of the task-recency bias caused by class imbalance, we propose a revised focal loss to mainly keep stability. By utilizing a new weight function, the revised focal loss will pay more attention to current ambiguous samples, which are the potentially valuable samples to make model progress quickly. To promote plasticity, we introduce a virtual knowledge distillation. By designing a virtual teacher, it assigns more attention to non-target classes, which can surmount overconfidence and encourage model to focus on inter-class information. Extensive experiments on three popular datasets for OCIL have shown the effectiveness of AFS. The code will be available at https://github.com/czjghost/AFS.