Gradient Regularization with Multivariate Distribution of Previous Knowledge for Continual Learning

Abstract

Continual learning is a novel learning setup for an environment where data are introduced sequentially, and a model continually learns new tasks. However, the model forgets the learned knowledge as it learns new classes. There is an approach that keeps a few previous data, but this causes other problems such as overfitting and class imbalance. In this paper, we propose a method that retrains a network with generated representations from an estimated multivariate Gaussian distribution. The representations are the vectors coming from CNN that is trained using a gradient regularization to prevent a distribution shift, allowing the stored means and covariances to create realistic representations. The generated vectors contain every class seen so far, which helps preventing the forgetting. Our 6-fold cross-validation experiment shows that the proposed method outperforms the existing continual learning methods by 1.14%p and 4.60%p in CIFAR10 and CIFAR100, respectively. Moreover, we visualize the generated vectors using t-SNE to confirm the validity of multivariate Gaussian mixture to estimate the distribution of the data representations.