Despite their success for object detection, convolutional neural networks are ill-equipped for incremental learning, i.e., adapting the original model trained on a set of classes to additionally detect objects of new classes, in the absence of the initial training data. They suffer from "catastrophic forgetting" - an abrupt degradation of performance on the original set of classes, when the training objective is adapted to the new classes. We present a method to address this issue, and learn object detectors incrementally, when neither the original training data nor annotations for the original classes in the new training set are available. The core of our proposed solution is a loss function to balance the interplay between predictions on the new classes and a new distillation loss which minimizes the discrepancy between responses for old classes from the original and the updated networks. This incremental learning can be performed multiple times, for a new set of classes in each step, with a moderate drop in performance compared to the baseline network trained on the ensemble of data. We present object detection results on the PASCAL VOC 2007 and COCO datasets, along with a detailed empirical analysis of the approach.
Methods and systems for performing a sequence of machine learning tasks. One system includes a sequence of deep neural networks (DNNs), including: a first DNN corresponding to a first machine learning task, wherein the first DNN comprises a first plurality of indexed layers, and each layer in the first plurality of indexed layers is configured to receive a respective layer input and process the layer input to generate a respective layer output; and one or more subsequent DNNs corresponding to one or more respective machine learning tasks, wherein each subsequent DNN comprises a respective plurality of indexed layers, and each layer in a respective plurality of indexed layers with index greater than one receives input from a preceding layer of the respective subsequent DNN, and one or more preceding layers of respective preceding DNNs, wherein a preceding layer is a layer whose index is one less than the current index. When building a unified vision system or gradually adding new capabilities to a system, the usual assumption is that training data for all tasks is always available. However, as the number of tasks grows, storing and retraining on such data becomes infeasible. A new problem arises where we add new capabilities to a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), but the training data for its existing capabilities are unavailable. We propose our Learning without Forgetting method, which uses only new task data to train the network while preserving the original capabilities. Our method performs favorably compared to commonly used feature extraction and fine-tuning adaption techniques and performs similarly to multitask learning that uses original task data we assume unavailable. A more surprising observation is that Learning without Forgetting may be able to replace fine-tuning with similar old and new task datasets for improved new task performance. Abstract The ability to learn tasks in a sequential fashion is crucial to the development of artificial intelligence. Until now neural networks have not been capable of this and it has been widely thought that catastrophic forgetting is an inevitable feature of connectionist models. We show that it is possible to overcome this limitation and train networks that can maintain expertise on tasks that they have not experienced for a long time. Our approach remembers old tasks by selectively slowing down learning on the weights important for those tasks. We demonstrate our approach is scalable and effective by solving a set of classification tasks based on a hand-written digit dataset and by learning several Atari 2600 games sequentially. 