Class-Incremental Learning via Dual Augmentation

Fei Zhu, Zhen Cheng, Xu-yao Zhang, Cheng-lin Liu

Keywords: class-incremental learning, continual learning, catastrophic forgetting, augmentation

TL;DR: We investigate the learning of representation and classifier in incremental learning, and propose a simple and effective dual augmentation framwork to overcome the catastrophic forgetting.

Abstract: Deep learning systems typically suffer from catastrophic forgetting of past knowledge when acquiring new skills continually. In this paper, we emphasize two dilemmas, representation bias and classifier bias in class-incremental learning, and present a simple and novel approach that employs explicit class augmentation (classAug) and implicit semantic augmentation (semanAug) to address the two biases, respectively. On the one hand, we propose to address the representation bias by learning transferable and diverse representations. Specifically, we investigate the feature representations in incremental learning based on spectral analysis and present a simple technique called classAug, to let the model see more classes during training for learning representations transferable across classes. On the other hand, to overcome the classifier bias, semanAug implicitly involves the simultaneous generating of an infinite number of instances of old classes in the deep feature space, which poses tighter constraints to maintain the decision boundary of previously learned classes. Without storing any old samples, our method can perform comparably with representative data replay based approaches.

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