Dynamic Dual Buffer with Divide-and-Conquer Strategy for Online Continual Learning
This addresses the problem of maintaining model efficacy in dynamic learning environments for AI systems, representing an incremental improvement with specific optimizations.
The paper tackles catastrophic forgetting in online continual learning by introducing a dual memory framework with a novel sample selection and optimization strategy, achieving state-of-the-art performance in standard and imbalanced settings.
Online Continual Learning (OCL) presents a complex learning environment in which new data arrives in a batch-to-batch online format, and the risk of catastrophic forgetting can significantly impair model efficacy. In this study, we address OCL by introducing an innovative memory framework that incorporates a short-term memory system to retain dynamic information and a long-term memory system to archive enduring knowledge. Specifically, the long-term memory system comprises a collection of sub-memory buffers, each linked to a cluster prototype and designed to retain data samples from distinct categories. We propose a novel $K$-means-based sample selection method to identify cluster prototypes for each encountered category. To safeguard essential and critical samples, we introduce a novel memory optimisation strategy that selectively retains samples in the appropriate sub-memory buffer by evaluating each cluster prototype against incoming samples through an optimal transportation mechanism. This approach specifically promotes each sub-memory buffer to retain data samples that exhibit significant discrepancies from the corresponding cluster prototype, thereby ensuring the preservation of semantically rich information. In addition, we propose a novel Divide-and-Conquer (DAC) approach that formulates the memory updating as an optimisation problem and divides it into several subproblems. As a result, the proposed DAC approach can solve these subproblems separately and thus can significantly reduce computations of the proposed memory updating process. We conduct a series of experiments across standard and imbalanced learning settings, and the empirical findings indicate that the proposed memory framework achieves state-of-the-art performance in both learning contexts.