Semi-supervised Continual Learning with Meta Self-training

Stella Ho, Ming Liu, Lan Du, Yunfeng Li, Longxiang Gao, Shang Gao

Abstract: Continual learning (CL) aims to enhance sequential learning by alleviating the forgetting of previously acquired knowledge. Recent advances in CL lack consideration of the real-world scenarios, where labeled data are scarce and unlabeled data are abundant. To narrow this gap, we focus on semi-supervised continual learning (SSCL). We exploit unlabeled data under limited supervision in the CL setting and demonstrate the feasibility of semi-supervised learning in CL. In this work, we propose a novel method, namely Meta-SSCL, which combines meta-learning with pseudo-labeling and data augmentations to learn a sequence of semi-supervised tasks without catastrophic forgetting. Extensive experiments on CL benchmark text classification datasets show that our method achieves promising results in SSCL.