Knowledge Consolidation based Class Incremental Online Learning with Limited Data
This work addresses the problem of incremental learning with limited data for AI systems that need to adapt to new classes online, but it is incremental as it builds on existing meta-learning and knowledge consolidation techniques.
The paper tackles class incremental online learning with limited data, addressing catastrophic forgetting and overfitting without replay memory, and reports that the proposed method significantly outperforms other methods on several benchmarks.
We propose a novel approach for class incremental online learning in a limited data setting. This problem setting is challenging because of the following constraints: (1) Classes are given incrementally, which necessitates a class incremental learning approach; (2) Data for each class is given in an online fashion, i.e., each training example is seen only once during training; (3) Each class has very few training examples; and (4) We do not use or assume access to any replay/memory to store data from previous classes. Therefore, in this setting, we have to handle twofold problems of catastrophic forgetting and overfitting. In our approach, we learn robust representations that are generalizable across tasks without suffering from the problems of catastrophic forgetting and overfitting to accommodate future classes with limited samples. Our proposed method leverages the meta-learning framework with knowledge consolidation. The meta-learning framework helps the model for rapid learning when samples appear in an online fashion. Simultaneously, knowledge consolidation helps to learn a robust representation against forgetting under online updates to facilitate future learning. Our approach significantly outperforms other methods on several benchmarks.