DESIRE: Dynamic Knowledge Consolidation for Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning

Continual learning aims to equip models with the ability to retain previously learned knowledge like a human. Recent work incorporating Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning has revitalized the field by introducing lightweight extension modules. However, existing methods usually overlook the issue of information leakage caused by the fact that the experiment data have been used in pre-trained models. Once these duplicate data are removed in the pre-training phase, their performance can be severely affected. In this paper, we propose a new LoRA-based rehearsal-free method named DESIRE. Our method avoids imposing additional constraints during training to mitigate catastrophic forgetting, thereby maximizing the learning of new classes. To integrate knowledge from old and new tasks, we propose two efficient post-processing modules. On the one hand, we retain only two sets of LoRA parameters for merging and propose dynamic representation consolidation to calibrate the merged feature representation. On the other hand, we propose decision boundary refinement to address classifier bias when training solely on new class data. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets and strikes an effective balance between stability and plasticity. Our code will be publicly available.

Happy: A Debiased Learning Framework for Continual Generalized Category Discovery

Constantly discovering novel concepts is crucial in evolving environments. This paper explores the underexplored task of Continual Generalized Category Discovery (C-GCD), which aims to incrementally discover new classes from unlabeled data while maintaining the ability to recognize previously learned classes. Although several settings are proposed to study the C-GCD task, they have limitations that do not reflect real-world scenarios. We thus study a more practical C-GCD setting, which includes more new classes to be discovered over a longer period, without storing samples of past classes. In C-GCD, the model is initially trained on labeled data of known classes, followed by multiple incremental stages where the model is fed with unlabeled data containing both old and new classes. The core challenge involves two conflicting objectives: discover new classes and prevent forgetting old ones. We delve into the conflicts and identify that models are susceptible to prediction bias and hardness bias. To address these issues, we introduce a debiased learning framework, namely Happy, characterized by Hardness-aware prototype sampling and soft entropy regularization. For the prediction bias, we first introduce clustering-guided initialization to provide robust features. In addition, we propose soft entropy regularization to assign appropriate probabilities to new classes, which can significantly enhance the clustering performance of new classes. For the harness bias, we present the hardness-aware prototype sampling, which can effectively reduce the forgetting issue for previously seen classes, especially for difficult classes. Experimental results demonstrate our method proficiently manages the conflicts of C-GCD and achieves remarkable performance across various datasets, e.g., 7.5% overall gains on ImageNet-100. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/mashijie1028/Happy-CGCD.

ModalPrompt:Dual-Modality Guided Prompt for Continual Learning of Large Multimodal Models

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) exhibit remarkable multi-tasking ability by learning mixed datasets jointly. However, novel tasks would be encountered sequentially in dynamic world, and continually fine-tuning LMMs often leads to performance degrades. To handle the challenges of catastrophic forgetting, existing methods leverage data replay or model expansion, both of which are not specially developed for LMMs and have their inherent limitations. In this paper, we propose a novel dual-modality guided prompt learning framework (ModalPrompt) tailored for multimodal continual learning to effectively learn new tasks while alleviating forgetting of previous knowledge. Concretely, we learn prototype prompts for each task and exploit efficient prompt selection for task identifiers and prompt fusion for knowledge transfer based on image-text supervision. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our approach, e.g., ModalPrompt achieves +20% performance gain on LMMs continual learning benchmarks with $\times$ 1.42 inference speed refraining from growing training cost in proportion to the number of tasks. The code will be made publically available.

Enhancing Outlier Knowledge for Few-Shot Out-of-Distribution Detection with Extensible Local Prompts

Out-of-Distribution (OOD) detection, aiming to distinguish outliers from known categories, has gained prominence in practical scenarios. Recently, the advent of vision-language models (VLM) has heightened interest in enhancing OOD detection for VLM through few-shot tuning. However, existing methods mainly focus on optimizing global prompts, ignoring refined utilization of local information with regard to outliers. Motivated by this, we freeze global prompts and introduce a novel coarse-to-fine tuning paradigm to emphasize regional enhancement with local prompts. Our method comprises two integral components: global prompt guided negative augmentation and local prompt enhanced regional regularization. The former utilizes frozen, coarse global prompts as guiding cues to incorporate negative augmentation, thereby leveraging local outlier knowledge. The latter employs trainable local prompts and a regional regularization to capture local information effectively, aiding in outlier identification. We also propose regional-related metric to empower the enrichment of OOD detection. Moreover, since our approach explores enhancing local prompts only, it can be seamlessly integrated with trained global prompts during inference to boost the performance. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and potential of our method. Notably, our method reduces average FPR95 by 5.17% against state-of-the-art method in 4-shot tuning on challenging ImageNet-1k dataset, even outperforming 16-shot results of previous methods.

Recoverable Compression: A Multimodal Vision Token Recovery Mechanism Guided by Text Information

With the advancement of large-scale language modeling techniques, large multimodal models combining visual encoders with large language models have demonstrated exceptional performance in various visual tasks. Most of the current large-scale multimodal models achieve this by mapping visual features obtained from the visual encoder into a large language model and using them as inputs alongside text for downstream tasks. Therefore, the number of visual tokens directly affects the training and inference speed of the model. There has been significant work on token pruning for visual transformers, but for large multimodal models, only relying on visual information for token pruning or compression may lead to significant loss of important information. On the other hand, the textual input in the form of a question may contain valuable information that can aid in answering the question, providing additional knowledge to the model. To address the potential oversimplification and excessive pruning that can occur with most purely visual token pruning methods, we propose a text information-guided dynamic visual token recovery mechanism that does not require training. This mechanism leverages the similarity between the question text and visual tokens to recover visually meaningful tokens with important text information while merging other less important tokens. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves comparable performance to the original approach while compressing the visual tokens to an average of 10% of the original quantity. Our source code will be made publicly available following acceptance.

Adapting Vision-Language Models to Open Classes via Test-Time Prompt Tuning

Adapting pre-trained models to open classes is a challenging problem in machine learning. Vision-language models fully explore the knowledge of text modality, demonstrating strong zero-shot recognition performance, which is naturally suited for various open-set problems. More recently, some research focuses on fine-tuning such models to downstream tasks. Prompt tuning methods achieved huge improvements by learning context vectors on few-shot data. However, through the evaluation under open-set adaptation setting with the test data including new classes, we find that there exists a dilemma that learned prompts have worse generalization abilities than hand-crafted prompts. In this paper, we consider combining the advantages of both and come up with a test-time prompt tuning approach, which leverages the maximum concept matching (MCM) scores as dynamic weights to generate an input-conditioned prompt for each image during test. Through extensive experiments on 11 different datasets, we show that our proposed method outperforms all comparison methods on average considering both base and new classes. The code is available at https://github.com/gaozhengqing/TTPT

StylePrompter: Enhancing Domain Generalization with Test-Time Style Priors

In real-world applications, the sample distribution at the inference stage often differs from the one at the training stage, causing performance degradation of trained deep models. The research on domain generalization (DG) aims to develop robust algorithms that can improve the generalized performance in unseen domains by training on a few domains. However, the domain-agnostic vision model, trained on a limited number of domains using traditional domain generalization methods, cannot guarantee its effectiveness in dealing with unseen domains. The introduction of language can break the closed cognition space of the vision model, providing additional semantic information that cannot be inferred from vision-only datasets. In this paper, we propose to overcome the challenge in previous DG methods by introducing the style prompt in the language modality to adapt the trained model dynamically. In particular, we train a style prompter to extract style information of the current image into an embedding in the token embedding space and place it in front of the candidate category words as prior knowledge to prompt the model. Our open space partition of the style token embedding space and the hand-crafted style regularization enable the trained style prompter to handle data from unknown domains effectively. Extensive experiments verify the effectiveness of our method and demonstrate state-of-the-art performances on multiple public datasets. Codes will be available after the acceptance of this paper.

PASS++: A Dual Bias Reduction Framework for Non-Exemplar Class-Incremental Learning

Class-incremental learning (CIL) aims to recognize new classes incrementally while maintaining the discriminability of old classes. Most existing CIL methods are exemplar-based, i.e., storing a part of old data for retraining. Without relearning old data, those methods suffer from catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we figure out two inherent problems in CIL, i.e., representation bias and classifier bias, that cause catastrophic forgetting of old knowledge. To address these two biases, we present a simple and novel dual bias reduction framework that employs self-supervised transformation (SST) in input space and prototype augmentation (protoAug) in deep feature space. On the one hand, SST alleviates the representation bias by learning generic and diverse representations that can transfer across different tasks. On the other hand, protoAug overcomes the classifier bias by explicitly or implicitly augmenting prototypes of old classes in the deep feature space, which poses tighter constraints to maintain previously learned decision boundaries. We further propose hardness-aware prototype augmentation and multi-view ensemble strategies, leading to significant improvements. The proposed framework can be easily integrated with pre-trained models. Without storing any samples of old classes, our method can perform comparably with state-of-the-art exemplar-based approaches which store plenty of old data. We hope to draw the attention of researchers back to non-exemplar CIL by rethinking the necessity of storing old samples in CIL.

Differentiable Proximal Graph Matching

Graph matching is a fundamental tool in computer vision and pattern recognition. In this paper, we introduce an algorithm for graph matching based on the proximal operator, referred to as differentiable proximal graph matching (DPGM). Specifically, we relax and decompose the quadratic assignment problem for the graph matching into a sequence of convex optimization problems. The whole algorithm can be considered as a differentiable map from the graph affinity matrix to the prediction of node correspondence. Therefore, the proposed method can be organically integrated into an end-to-end deep learning framework to jointly learn both the deep feature representation and the graph affinity matrix. In addition, we provide a theoretical guarantee to ensure the proposed method converges to a stable point with a reasonable number of iterations. Numerical experiments show that PGM outperforms existing graph matching algorithms on diverse datasets such as synthetic data, and CMU House. Meanwhile, PGM can fully harness the capability of deep feature extractors and achieve state-of-art performance on PASCAL VOC keypoints.

Unified Entropy Optimization for Open-Set Test-Time Adaptation

Test-time adaptation (TTA) aims at adapting a model pre-trained on the labeled source domain to the unlabeled target domain. Existing methods usually focus on improving TTA performance under covariate shifts, while neglecting semantic shifts. In this paper, we delve into a realistic open-set TTA setting where the target domain may contain samples from unknown classes. Many state-of-the-art closed-set TTA methods perform poorly when applied to open-set scenarios, which can be attributed to the inaccurate estimation of data distribution and model confidence. To address these issues, we propose a simple but effective framework called unified entropy optimization (UniEnt), which is capable of simultaneously adapting to covariate-shifted in-distribution (csID) data and detecting covariate-shifted out-of-distribution (csOOD) data. Specifically, UniEnt first mines pseudo-csID and pseudo-csOOD samples from test data, followed by entropy minimization on the pseudo-csID data and entropy maximization on the pseudo-csOOD data. Furthermore, we introduce UniEnt+ to alleviate the noise caused by hard data partition leveraging sample-level confidence. Extensive experiments on CIFAR benchmarks and Tiny-ImageNet-C show the superiority of our framework. The code is available at https://github.com/gaozhengqing/UniEnt