Balanced Softmax Cross-Entropy for Incremental Learning

Deep neural networks are prone to catastrophic forgetting when incrementally trained on new classes or new tasks as adaptation to the new data leads to a drastic decrease of the performance on the old classes and tasks. By using a small memory for rehearsal and knowledge distillation, recent methods have proven to be effective to mitigate catastrophic forgetting. However due to the limited size of the memory, large imbalance between the amount of data available for the old and new classes still remains which results in a deterioration of the overall accuracy of the model. To address this problem, we propose the use of the Balanced Softmax Cross-Entropy loss and show that it can be combined with exiting methods for incremental learning to improve their performances while also decreasing the computational cost of the training procedure in some cases. Complete experiments on the competitive ImageNet, subImageNet and CIFAR100 datasets show states-of-the-art results.