Incremental learning (IL) is an important task aimed at increasing the capability of a trained model, in terms of the number of classes recognizable by the model. The key problem in this task is the requirement of storing data (e.g. images) associated with existing classes, while teaching the classifier to learn new classes. However, this is impractical as it increases the memory requirement at every incremental step, which makes it impossible to implement IL algorithms on edge devices with limited memory. Hence, we propose a novel approach, called Learning without Memorizing (LwM)', to preserve the information about existing (base) classes, without storing any of their data, while making the classifier progressively learn the new classes. In LwM, we present an information preserving penalty: Attention Distillation Loss ( @math ), and demonstrate that penalizing the changes in classifiers' attention maps helps to retain information of the base classes, as new classes are added. We show that adding @math to the distillation loss which is an existing information preserving loss consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art performance in the iILSVRC-small and iCIFAR-100 datasets in terms of the overall accuracy of base and incrementally learned classes.
Several experiments have been proposed to use a small percentage of the data of base classes while training the classifier to learn new classes. iCaRL @cite_4 uses the exemplars of base classes, while incrementally learning new classes. Similarly, @cite_2 also use a fraction of the data of base classes. @cite_2 also show that this is especially useful for alleviating intransigence, which is a problem faced in single-headed evaluation. However, storing data for base classes increases memory requirement at each incremental step, which is not feasible when the memory budget is limited.
@cite_4 @cite_2
2786498526 2161208102
In this paper, we address the incremental classifier learning problem, which suffers from catastrophic forgetting. The main reason for catastrophic forgetting is that the past data are not available during learning. Typical approaches keep some exemplars for the past classes and use distillation regularization to retain the classification capability on the past classes and balance the past and new classes. However, there are four main problems with these approaches. First, the loss function is not efficient for classification. Second, there is unbalance problem between the past and new classes. Third, the size of pre-decided exemplars is usually limited and they might not be distinguishable from unseen new classes. Forth, the exemplars may not be allowed to be kept for a long time due to privacy regulations. To address these problems, we propose (a) a new loss function to combine the cross-entropy loss and distillation loss, (b) a simple way to estimate and remove the unbalance between the old and new classes , and (c) using Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to generate historical data and select representative exemplars during generation. We believe that the data generated by GANs have much less privacy issues than real images because GANs do not directly copy any real image patches. We evaluate the proposed method on CIFAR-100, Flower-102, and MS-Celeb-1M-Base datasets and extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. We have previously introduced an incremental learning algorithm Learn++, which learns novel information from consecutive data sets by generating an ensemble of classifiers with each data set, and combining them by weighted majority voting. However, Learn++ suffers from an inherent ldquooutvotingrdquo problem when asked to learn a new class omeganew introduced by a subsequent data set, as earlier classifiers not trained on this class are guaranteed to misclassify omeganew instances. The collective votes of earlier classifiers, for an inevitably incorrect decision, then outweigh the votes of the new classifiers' correct decision on omeganew instances-until there are enough new classifiers to counteract the unfair outvoting. This forces Learn++ to generate an unnecessarily large number of classifiers. This paper describes Learn++ .NC, specifically designed for efficient incremental learning of multiple new classes using significantly fewer classifiers. To do so, Learn ++.NC introduces dynamically weighted consult and vote (DW-CAV) , a novel voting mechanism for combining classifiers: individual classifiers consult with each other to determine which ones are most qualified to classify a given instance, and decide how much weight, if any, each classifier's decision should carry. Experiments on real-world problems indicate that the new algorithm performs remarkably well with substantially fewer classifiers, not only as compared to its predecessor Learn++, but also as compared to several other algorithms recently proposed for similar problems.