Mitigating Interference in the Knowledge Continuum through Attention-Guided Incremental Learning

Continual learning (CL) remains a significant challenge for deep neural networks, as it is prone to forgetting previously acquired knowledge. Several approaches have been proposed in the literature, such as experience rehearsal, regularization, and parameter isolation, to address this problem. Although almost zero forgetting can be achieved in task-incremental learning, class-incremental learning remains highly challenging due to the problem of inter-task class separation. Limited access to previous task data makes it difficult to discriminate between classes of current and previous tasks. To address this issue, we propose `Attention-Guided Incremental Learning' (AGILE), a novel rehearsal-based CL approach that incorporates compact task attention to effectively reduce interference between tasks. AGILE utilizes lightweight, learnable task projection vectors to transform the latent representations of a shared task attention module toward task distribution. Through extensive empirical evaluation, we show that AGILE significantly improves generalization performance by mitigating task interference and outperforming rehearsal-based approaches in several CL scenarios. Furthermore, AGILE can scale well to a large number of tasks with minimal overhead while remaining well-calibrated with reduced task-recency bias.

IMEX-Reg: Implicit-Explicit Regularization in the Function Space for Continual Learning

Continual learning (CL) remains one of the long-standing challenges for deep neural networks due to catastrophic forgetting of previously acquired knowledge. Although rehearsal-based approaches have been fairly successful in mitigating catastrophic forgetting, they suffer from overfitting on buffered samples and prior information loss, hindering generalization under low-buffer regimes. Inspired by how humans learn using strong inductive biases, we propose IMEX-Reg to improve the generalization performance of experience rehearsal in CL under low buffer regimes. Specifically, we employ a two-pronged implicit-explicit regularization approach using contrastive representation learning (CRL) and consistency regularization. To further leverage the global relationship between representations learned using CRL, we propose a regularization strategy to guide the classifier toward the activation correlations in the unit hypersphere of the CRL. Our results show that IMEX-Reg significantly improves generalization performance and outperforms rehearsal-based approaches in several CL scenarios. It is also robust to natural and adversarial corruptions with less task-recency bias. Additionally, we provide theoretical insights to support our design decisions further.