On the importance of cross-task features for class-incremental learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Soutif--Cormerais, Albin, Masana, Marc, van de Weijer, Joost, Twardowski, Bartłomiej
Format: Preprint
Published: 2021
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author Soutif--Cormerais, Albin
Masana, Marc
van de Weijer, Joost
Twardowski, Bartłomiej
author_facet Soutif--Cormerais, Albin
Masana, Marc
van de Weijer, Joost
Twardowski, Bartłomiej
contents In class-incremental learning, an agent with limited resources needs to learn a sequence of classification tasks, forming an ever growing classification problem, with the constraint of not being able to access data from previous tasks. The main difference with task-incremental learning, where a task-ID is available at inference time, is that the learner also needs to perform cross-task discrimination, i.e. distinguish between classes that have not been seen together. Approaches to tackle this problem are numerous and mostly make use of an external memory (buffer) of non-negligible size. In this paper, we ablate the learning of cross-task features and study its influence on the performance of basic replay strategies used for class-IL. We also define a new forgetting measure for class-incremental learning, and see that forgetting is not the principal cause of low performance. Our experimental results show that future algorithms for class-incremental learning should not only prevent forgetting, but also aim to improve the quality of the cross-task features, and the knowledge transfer between tasks. This is especially important when tasks contain limited amount of data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2106_11930
institution arXiv
publishDate 2021
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the importance of cross-task features for class-incremental learning
Soutif--Cormerais, Albin
Masana, Marc
van de Weijer, Joost
Twardowski, Bartłomiej
Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
In class-incremental learning, an agent with limited resources needs to learn a sequence of classification tasks, forming an ever growing classification problem, with the constraint of not being able to access data from previous tasks. The main difference with task-incremental learning, where a task-ID is available at inference time, is that the learner also needs to perform cross-task discrimination, i.e. distinguish between classes that have not been seen together. Approaches to tackle this problem are numerous and mostly make use of an external memory (buffer) of non-negligible size. In this paper, we ablate the learning of cross-task features and study its influence on the performance of basic replay strategies used for class-IL. We also define a new forgetting measure for class-incremental learning, and see that forgetting is not the principal cause of low performance. Our experimental results show that future algorithms for class-incremental learning should not only prevent forgetting, but also aim to improve the quality of the cross-task features, and the knowledge transfer between tasks. This is especially important when tasks contain limited amount of data.
title On the importance of cross-task features for class-incremental learning
topic Machine Learning
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.11930