NEVIS'22: A Stream of 100 Tasks Sampled from 30 Years of Computer Vision Research

We introduce the Never Ending VIsual-classification Stream (NEVIS'22), a benchmark consisting of a stream of over 100 visual classification tasks, sorted chronologically and extracted from papers sampled uniformly from computer vision proceedings spanning the last three decades. The resulting stream reflects what the research community thought was meaningful at any point in time. Despite being limited to classification, the resulting stream has a rich diversity of tasks from OCR, to texture analysis, crowd counting, scene recognition, and so forth. The diversity is also reflected in the wide range of dataset sizes, spanning over four orders of magnitude. Overall, NEVIS'22 poses an unprecedented challenge for current sequential learning approaches due to the scale and diversity of tasks, yet with a low entry barrier as it is limited to a single modality and each task is a classical supervised learning problem. Moreover, we provide a reference implementation including strong baselines and a simple evaluation protocol to compare methods in terms of their trade-off between accuracy and compute. We hope that NEVIS'22 can be useful to researchers working on continual learning, meta-learning, AutoML and more generally sequential learning, and help these communities join forces towards more robust and efficient models that efficiently adapt to a never ending stream of data. Implementations have been made available at https://github.com/deepmind/dm_nevis.