Continual Object Detection via Prototypical Task Correlation Guided Gating Mechanism
This addresses the challenge of catastrophic forgetting in object detection for AI systems that learn from streaming data, representing an incremental improvement over prior methods.
The paper tackles the problem of continual object detection by introducing ROSETTA, a framework that uses task-aware gates and a prototypical task correlation mechanism to adaptively select sub-models, achieving state-of-the-art performance on benchmarks like COCO-VOC and KITTI-Kitchen.
Continual learning is a challenging real-world problem for constructing a mature AI system when data are provided in a streaming fashion. Despite recent progress in continual classification, the researches of continual object detection are impeded by the diverse sizes and numbers of objects in each image. Different from previous works that tune the whole network for all tasks, in this work, we present a simple and flexible framework for continual object detection via pRotOtypical taSk corrElaTion guided gaTing mechAnism (ROSETTA). Concretely, a unified framework is shared by all tasks while task-aware gates are introduced to automatically select sub-models for specific tasks. In this way, various knowledge can be successively memorized by storing their corresponding sub-model weights in this system. To make ROSETTA automatically determine which experience is available and useful, a prototypical task correlation guided Gating Diversity Controller(GDC) is introduced to adaptively adjust the diversity of gates for the new task based on class-specific prototypes. GDC module computes class-to-class correlation matrix to depict the cross-task correlation, and hereby activates more exclusive gates for the new task if a significant domain gap is observed. Comprehensive experiments on COCO-VOC, KITTI-Kitchen, class-incremental detection on VOC and sequential learning of four tasks show that ROSETTA yields state-of-the-art performance on both task-based and class-based continual object detection.