I2CANSAY:Inter-Class Analogical Augmentation and Intra-Class Significance Analysis for Non-Exemplar Online Task-Free Continual Learning

TL;DR

I2CANSAY introduces a buffer-free continual learning framework that uses analogical augmentation and attribute significance analysis to effectively learn from one-shot samples, outperforming existing methods.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel buffer-free continual learning method with modules for pseudo-feature generation and attribute importance analysis, improving learning efficiency and privacy.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art on four image datasets

Eliminates reliance on memory buffers for continual learning

Enhances learning from one-shot samples

Abstract

Online task-free continual learning (OTFCL) is a more challenging variant of continual learning which emphasizes the gradual shift of task boundaries and learns in an online mode. Existing methods rely on a memory buffer composed of old samples to prevent forgetting. However,the use of memory buffers not only raises privacy concerns but also hinders the efficient learning of new samples. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework called I2CANSAY that gets rid of the dependence on memory buffers and efficiently learns the knowledge of new data from one-shot samples. Concretely, our framework comprises two main modules. Firstly, the Inter-Class Analogical Augmentation (ICAN) module generates diverse pseudo-features for old classes based on the inter-class analogy of feature distributions for different new classes, serving as a substitute for the memory buffer. Secondly, the Intra-Class Significance Analysis (ISAY) module analyzes the significance of attributes for each class via its distribution standard deviation, and generates the importance vector as a correction bias for the linear classifier, thereby enhancing the capability of learning from new samples. We run our experiments on four popular image classification datasets: CoRe50, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and CUB-200, our approach outperforms the prior state-of-the-art by a large margin.