DUKAE: DUal-level Knowledge Accumulation and Ensemble for Pre-Trained Model-Based Continual Learning
This work addresses incremental improvements in continual learning for AI systems by enhancing knowledge retention and representation capabilities.
The paper tackled the problem of misaligned classification heads and restricted feature-level knowledge accumulation in pre-trained model-based continual learning, achieving superior performance on multiple datasets.
Pre-trained model-based continual learning (PTMCL) has garnered growing attention, as it enables more rapid acquisition of new knowledge by leveraging the extensive foundational understanding inherent in pre-trained model (PTM). Most existing PTMCL methods use Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) to learn new knowledge while consolidating existing memory. However, they often face some challenges. A major challenge lies in the misalignment of classification heads, as the classification head of each task is trained within a distinct feature space, leading to inconsistent decision boundaries across tasks and, consequently, increased forgetting. Another critical limitation stems from the restricted feature-level knowledge accumulation, with feature learning typically restricted to the initial task only, which constrains the model's representation capabilities. To address these issues, we propose a method named DUal-level Knowledge Accumulation and Ensemble (DUKAE) that leverages both feature-level and decision-level knowledge accumulation by aligning classification heads into a unified feature space through Gaussian distribution sampling and introducing an adaptive expertise ensemble to fuse knowledge across feature subspaces. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-100, ImageNet-R, CUB-200, and Cars-196 datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our approach.