The continual appearance of new objects in the visual world poses considerable challenges for current deep learning methods in real-world deployments. The challenge of new task learning is often exacerbated by the scarcity of data for the new categories due to rarity or cost. Here we explore the important task of Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) and its extreme data scarcity condition of one-shot. An ideal FSCIL model needs to perform well on all classes, regardless of their presentation order or paucity of data. It also needs to be robust to open-set real-world conditions and be easily adapted to the new tasks that always arise in the field. In this paper, we first reevaluate the current task setting and propose a more comprehensive and practical setting for the FSCIL task. Then, inspired by the similarity of the goals for FSCIL and modern face recognition systems, we propose our method -- Augmented Angular Loss Incremental Classification or ALICE. In ALICE, instead of the commonly used cross-entropy loss, we propose to use the angular penalty loss to obtain well-clustered features. As the obtained features not only need to be compactly clustered but also diverse enough to maintain generalization for future incremental classes, we further discuss how class augmentation, data augmentation, and data balancing affect classification performance. Experiments on benchmark datasets, including CIFAR100, miniImageNet, and CUB200, demonstrate the improved performance of ALICE over the state-of-the-art FSCIL methods.
Exemplar-free Class-incremental Learning (CIL) is a challenging problem because rehearsing data from previous phases is strictly prohibited, causing catastrophic forgetting of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). In this paper, we present iVoro, a holistic framework for CIL, derived from computational geometry. We found Voronoi Diagram (VD), a classical model for space subdivision, is especially powerful for solving the CIL problem, because VD itself can be constructed favorably in an incremental manner -- the newly added sites (classes) will only affect the proximate classes, making the non-contiguous classes hardly forgettable. Further, in order to find a better set of centers for VD construction, we colligate DNN with VD using Power Diagram and show that the VD structure can be optimized by integrating local DNN models using a divide-and-conquer algorithm. Moreover, our VD construction is not restricted to the deep feature space, but is also applicable to multiple intermediate feature spaces, promoting VD to be multi-centered VD (CIVD) that efficiently captures multi-grained features from DNN. Importantly, iVoro is also capable of handling uncertainty-aware test-time Voronoi cell assignment and has exhibited high correlations between geometric uncertainty and predictive accuracy (up to ~0.9). Putting everything together, iVoro achieves up to 25.26%, 37.09%, and 33.21% improvements on CIFAR-100, TinyImageNet, and ImageNet-Subset, respectively, compared to the state-of-the-art non-exemplar CIL approaches. In conclusion, iVoro enables highly accurate, privacy-preserving, and geometrically interpretable CIL that is particularly useful when cross-phase data sharing is forbidden, e.g. in medical applications. Our code is available at https://machunwei.github.io/ivoro.
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) has been proposed aiming to enable a deep learning system to incrementally learn new classes with limited data. Recently, a pioneer claims that the commonly used replay-based method in class-incremental learning (CIL) is ineffective and thus not preferred for FSCIL. This has, if truth, a significant influence on the fields of FSCIL. In this paper, we show through empirical results that adopting the data replay is surprisingly favorable. However, storing and replaying old data can lead to a privacy concern. To address this issue, we alternatively propose using data-free replay that can synthesize data by a generator without accessing real data. In observing the the effectiveness of uncertain data for knowledge distillation, we impose entropy regularization in the generator training to encourage more uncertain examples. Moreover, we propose to relabel the generated data with one-hot-like labels. This modification allows the network to learn by solely minimizing the cross-entropy loss, which mitigates the problem of balancing different objectives in the conventional knowledge distillation approach. Finally, we show extensive experimental results and analysis on CIFAR-100, miniImageNet and CUB-200 to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed one.
Deep neural networks perform well on classification tasks where data streams are i.i.d. and labeled data is abundant. Challenges emerge with non-stationary training data streams such as continual learning. One powerful approach that has addressed this challenge involves pre-training of large encoders on volumes of readily available data, followed by task-specific tuning. Given a new task, however, updating the weights of these encoders is challenging as a large number of weights needs to be fine-tuned, and as a result, they forget information about the previous tasks. In the present work, we propose a model architecture to address this issue, building upon a discrete bottleneck containing pairs of separate and learnable key-value codes. Our paradigm will be to encode; process the representation via a discrete bottleneck; and decode. Here, the input is fed to the pre-trained encoder, the output of the encoder is used to select the nearest keys, and the corresponding values are fed to the decoder to solve the current task. The model can only fetch and re-use a sparse number of these key-value pairs during inference, enabling localized and context-dependent model updates. We theoretically investigate the ability of the discrete key-value bottleneck to minimize the effect of learning under distribution shifts and show that it reduces the complexity of the hypothesis class. We empirically verify the proposed method under challenging class-incremental learning scenarios and show that the proposed model - without any task boundaries - reduces catastrophic forgetting across a wide variety of pre-trained models, outperforming relevant baselines on this task.
Few-Shot Class-Incremental Learning (FSCIL) aims at incrementally learning novel classes from a few labeled samples by avoiding the overfitting and catastrophic forgetting simultaneously. The current protocol of FSCIL is built by mimicking the general class-incremental learning setting, while it is not totally appropriate due to the different data configuration, i.e., novel classes are all in the limited data regime. In this paper, we rethink the configuration of FSCIL with the open-set hypothesis by reserving the possibility in the first session for incoming categories. To assign better performances on both close-set and open-set recognition to the model, Hyperbolic Reciprocal Point Learning module (Hyper-RPL) is built on Reciprocal Point Learning (RPL) with hyperbolic neural networks. Besides, for learning novel categories from limited labeled data, we incorporate a hyperbolic metric learning (Hyper-Metric) module into the distillation-based framework to alleviate the overfitting issue and better handle the trade-off issue between the preservation of old knowledge and the acquisition of new knowledge. The comprehensive assessments of the proposed configuration and modules on three benchmark datasets are executed to validate the effectiveness concerning three evaluation indicators.
Recent continual learning approaches have primarily focused on mitigating catastrophic forgetting. Nevertheless, two critical areas have remained relatively unexplored: 1) evaluating the robustness of proposed methods and 2) ensuring the security of learned tasks. This paper investigates the susceptibility of continually learned tasks, including current and previously acquired tasks, to adversarial attacks. Specifically, we have observed that any class belonging to any task can be easily targeted and misclassified as the desired target class of any other task. Such susceptibility or vulnerability of learned tasks to adversarial attacks raises profound concerns regarding data integrity and privacy. To assess the robustness of continual learning approaches, we consider continual learning approaches in all three scenarios, i.e., task-incremental learning, domain-incremental learning, and class-incremental learning. In this regard, we explore the robustness of three regularization-based methods, three replay-based approaches, and one hybrid technique that combines replay and exemplar approaches. We empirically demonstrated that in any setting of continual learning, any class, whether belonging to the current or previously learned tasks, is susceptible to misclassification. Our observations identify potential limitations of continual learning approaches against adversarial attacks and highlight that current continual learning algorithms could not be suitable for deployment in real-world settings.
Continual Learning aims to bring machine learning into a more realistic scenario, where tasks are learned sequentially and the i.i.d. assumption is not preserved. Although this setting is natural for biological systems, it proves very difficult for machine learning models such as artificial neural networks. To reduce this performance gap, we investigate the question whether biologically inspired Hebbian learning is useful for tackling continual challenges. In particular, we highlight a realistic and often overlooked unsupervised setting, where the learner has to build representations without any supervision. By combining sparse neural networks with Hebbian learning principle, we build a simple yet effective alternative (HebbCL) to typical neural network models trained via the gradient descent. Due to Hebbian learning, the network have easily interpretable weights, which might be essential in critical application such as security or healthcare. We demonstrate the efficacy of HebbCL in an unsupervised learning setting applied to MNIST and Omniglot datasets. We also adapt the algorithm to the supervised scenario and obtain promising results in the class-incremental learning.
Few-shot class-incremental learning(FSCIL) focuses on designing learning algorithms that can continually learn a sequence of new tasks from a few samples without forgetting old ones. The difficulties are that training on a sequence of limited data from new tasks leads to severe overfitting issues and causes the well-known catastrophic forgetting problem. Existing researches mainly utilize the image information, such as storing the image knowledge of previous tasks or limiting classifiers updating. However, they ignore analyzing the informative and less noisy text information of class labels. In this work, we propose leveraging the label-text information by adopting the memory prompt. The memory prompt can learn new data sequentially, and meanwhile store the previous knowledge. Furthermore, to optimize the memory prompt without undermining the stored knowledge, we propose a stimulation-based training strategy. It optimizes the memory prompt depending on the image embedding stimulation, which is the distribution of the image embedding elements. Experiments show that our proposed method outperforms all prior state-of-the-art approaches, significantly mitigating the catastrophic forgetting and overfitting problems.
Standard deep learning-based classification approaches require collecting all samples from all classes in advance and are trained offline. This paradigm may not be practical in real-world clinical applications, where new classes are incrementally introduced through the addition of new data. Class incremental learning is a strategy allowing learning from such data. However, a major challenge is catastrophic forgetting, i.e., performance degradation on previous classes when adapting a trained model to new data. Prior methodologies to alleviate this challenge save a portion of training data require perpetual storage of such data that may introduce privacy issues. Here, we propose a novel data-free class incremental learning framework that first synthesizes data from the model trained on previous classes to generate a \ours. Subsequently, it updates the model by combining the synthesized data with new class data. Furthermore, we incorporate a cosine normalized Cross-entropy loss to mitigate the adverse effects of the imbalance, a margin loss to increase separation among previous classes and new ones, and an intra-domain contrastive loss to generalize the model trained on the synthesized data to real data. We compare our proposed framework with state-of-the-art methods in class incremental learning, where we demonstrate improvement in accuracy for the classification of 11,062 echocardiography cine series of patients.
Deep learning models suffer from catastrophic forgetting when learning new tasks incrementally. Incremental learning has been proposed to retain the knowledge of old classes while learning to identify new classes. A typical approach is to use a few exemplars to avoid forgetting old knowledge. In such a scenario, data imbalance between old and new classes is a key issue that leads to performance degradation of the model. Several strategies have been designed to rectify the bias towards the new classes due to data imbalance. However, they heavily rely on the assumptions of the bias relation between old and new classes. Therefore, they are not suitable for complex real-world applications. In this study, we propose an assumption-agnostic method, Multi-Granularity Regularized re-Balancing (MGRB), to address this problem. Re-balancing methods are used to alleviate the influence of data imbalance; however, we empirically discover that they would under-fit new classes. To this end, we further design a novel multi-granularity regularization term that enables the model to consider the correlations of classes in addition to re-balancing the data. A class hierarchy is first constructed by grouping the semantically or visually similar classes. The multi-granularity regularization then transforms the one-hot label vector into a continuous label distribution, which reflects the relations between the target class and other classes based on the constructed class hierarchy. Thus, the model can learn the inter-class relational information, which helps enhance the learning of both old and new classes. Experimental results on both public datasets and a real-world fault diagnosis dataset verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.
While deep neural networks (DNNs) have achieved impressive classification performance in closed-world learning scenarios, they typically fail to generalize to unseen categories in dynamic open-world environments, in which the number of concepts is unbounded. In contrast, human and animal learners have the ability to incrementally update their knowledge by recognizing and adapting to novel observations. In particular, humans characterize concepts via exclusive (unique) sets of essential features, which are used for both recognizing known classes and identifying novelty. Inspired by natural learners, we introduce a Sparse High-level-Exclusive, Low-level-Shared feature representation (SHELS) that simultaneously encourages learning exclusive sets of high-level features and essential, shared low-level features. The exclusivity of the high-level features enables the DNN to automatically detect out-of-distribution (OOD) data, while the efficient use of capacity via sparse low-level features permits accommodating new knowledge. The resulting approach uses OOD detection to perform class-incremental continual learning without known class boundaries. We show that using SHELS for novelty detection results in statistically significant improvements over state-of-the-art OOD detection approaches over a variety of benchmark datasets. Further, we demonstrate that the SHELS model mitigates catastrophic forgetting in a class-incremental learning setting,enabling a combined novelty detection and accommodation framework that supports learning in open-world settings
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) has addressed challenging real-world scenarios where unseen novel classes continually arrive with few samples. In these scenarios, it is required to develop a model that recognizes the novel classes without forgetting prior knowledge. In other words, FSCIL aims to maintain the base performance and improve the novel performance simultaneously. However, there is little study to investigate the two performances separately. In this paper, we first decompose the entire model into four types of parameters and demonstrate that the tendency of the two performances varies greatly with the updated parameters when the novel classes appear. Based on the analysis, we propose a simple method for FSCIL, coined as NoNPC, which uses normalized prototype classifiers without further training for incremental novel classes. It is shown that our straightforward method has comparable performance with the sophisticated state-of-the-art algorithms.
When learning new tasks in a sequential manner, deep neural networks tend to forget tasks that they previously learned, a phenomenon called catastrophic forgetting. Class incremental learning methods aim to address this problem by keeping a memory of a few exemplars from previously learned tasks, and distilling knowledge from them. However, existing methods struggle to balance the performance across classes since they typically overfit the model to the latest task. In our work, we propose to address these challenges with the introduction of a novel methodology of Tangent Kernel for Incremental Learning (TKIL) that achieves class-balanced performance. The approach preserves the representations across classes and balances the accuracy for each class, and as such achieves better overall accuracy and variance. TKIL approach is based on Neural Tangent Kernel (NTK), which describes the convergence behavior of neural networks as a kernel function in the limit of infinite width. In TKIL, the gradients between feature layers are treated as the distance between the representations of these layers and can be defined as Gradients Tangent Kernel loss (GTK loss) such that it is minimized along with averaging weights. This allows TKIL to automatically identify the task and to quickly adapt to it during inference. Experiments on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets with various incremental learning settings show that these strategies allow TKIL to outperform existing state-of-the-art methods.
Class incremental learning (CIL) algorithms aim to continually learn new object classes from incrementally arriving data while not forgetting past learned classes. The common evaluation protocol for CIL algorithms is to measure the average test accuracy across all classes learned so far -- however, we argue that solely focusing on maximizing the test accuracy may not necessarily lead to developing a CIL algorithm that also continually learns and updates the representations, which may be transferred to the downstream tasks. To that end, we experimentally analyze neural network models trained by CIL algorithms using various evaluation protocols in representation learning and propose new analysis methods. Our experiments show that most state-of-the-art algorithms prioritize high stability and do not significantly change the learned representation, and sometimes even learn a representation of lower quality than a naive baseline. However, we observe that these algorithms can still achieve high test accuracy because they enable a model to learn a classifier that closely resembles an estimated linear classifier trained for linear probing. Furthermore, the base model learned in the first task, which involves single-task learning, exhibits varying levels of representation quality across different algorithms, and this variance impacts the final performance of CIL algorithms. Therefore, we suggest that the representation-level evaluation should be considered as an additional recipe for more diverse evaluation for CIL algorithms.
Class-incremental learning (CIL) suffers from the notorious dilemma between learning newly added classes and preserving previously learned class knowledge. That catastrophic forgetting issue could be mitigated by storing historical data for replay, which yet would cause memory overheads as well as imbalanced prediction updates. To address this dilemma, we propose to leverage "free" external unlabeled data querying in continual learning. We first present a CIL with Queried Unlabeled Data (CIL-QUD) scheme, where we only store a handful of past training samples as anchors and use them to query relevant unlabeled examples each time. Along with new and past stored data, the queried unlabeled are effectively utilized, through learning-without-forgetting (LwF) regularizers and class-balance training. Besides preserving model generalization over past and current tasks, we next study the problem of adversarial robustness for CIL-QUD. Inspired by the recent success of learning robust models with unlabeled data, we explore a new robustness-aware CIL setting, where the learned adversarial robustness has to resist forgetting and be transferred as new tasks come in continually. While existing options easily fail, we show queried unlabeled data can continue to benefit, and seamlessly extend CIL-QUD into its robustified versions, RCIL-QUD. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CIL-QUD achieves substantial accuracy gains on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100, compared to previous state-of-the-art CIL approaches. Moreover, RCIL-QUD establishes the first strong milestone for robustness-aware CIL. Codes are available in https://github.com/VITA-Group/CIL-QUD.
New malware emerges at a rapid pace and often incorporates Domain Generation Algorithms (DGAs) to avoid blocking the malware's connection to the command and control (C2) server. Current state-of-the-art classifiers are able to separate benign from malicious domains (binary classification) and attribute them with high probability to the DGAs that generated them (multiclass classification). While binary classifiers can label domains of yet unknown DGAs as malicious, multiclass classifiers can only assign domains to DGAs that are known at the time of training, limiting the ability to uncover new malware families. In this work, we perform a comprehensive study on the detection of new DGAs, which includes an evaluation of 59,690 classifiers. We examine four different approaches in 15 different configurations and propose a simple yet effective approach based on the combination of a softmax classifier and regular expressions (regexes) to detect multiple unknown DGAs with high probability. At the same time, our approach retains state-of-the-art classification performance for known DGAs. Our evaluation is based on a leave-one-group-out cross-validation with a total of 94 DGA families. By using the maximum number of known DGAs, our evaluation scenario is particularly difficult and close to the real world. All of the approaches examined are privacy-preserving, since they operate without context and exclusively on a single domain to be classified. We round up our study with a thorough discussion of class-incremental learning strategies that can adapt an existing classifier to newly discovered classes.
Few-shot class-incremental learning (FSCIL) aims to incrementally fine-tune a model (trained on base classes) for a novel set of classes using a few examples without forgetting the previous training. Recent efforts address this problem primarily on 2D images. However, due to the advancement of camera technology, 3D point cloud data has become more available than ever, which warrants considering FSCIL on 3D data. This paper addresses FSCIL in the 3D domain. In addition to well-known issues of catastrophic forgetting of past knowledge and overfitting of few-shot data, 3D FSCIL can bring newer challenges. For example, base classes may contain many synthetic instances in a realistic scenario. In contrast, only a few real-scanned samples (from RGBD sensors) of novel classes are available in incremental steps. Due to the data variation from synthetic to real, FSCIL endures additional challenges, degrading performance in later incremental steps. We attempt to solve this problem using Microshapes (orthogonal basis vectors) by describing any 3D objects using a pre-defined set of rules. It supports incremental training with few-shot examples minimizing synthetic to real data variation. We propose new test protocols for 3D FSCIL using popular synthetic datasets (ModelNet and ShapeNet) and 3D real-scanned datasets (ScanObjectNN and CO3D). By comparing state-of-the-art methods, we establish the effectiveness of our approach in the 3D domain.
Class-incremental learning (CIL) learns a classification model with training data of different classes arising progressively. Existing CIL either suffers from serious accuracy loss due to catastrophic forgetting, or invades data privacy by revisiting used exemplars. Inspired by linear learning formulations, we propose an analytic class-incremental learning (ACIL) with absolute memorization of past knowledge while avoiding breaching of data privacy (i.e., without storing historical data). The absolute memorization is demonstrated in the sense that class-incremental learning using ACIL given present data would give identical results to that from its joint-learning counterpart which consumes both present and historical samples. This equality is theoretically validated. Data privacy is ensured since no historical data are involved during the learning process. Empirical validations demonstrate ACIL's competitive accuracy performance with near-identical results for various incremental task settings (e.g., 5-50 phases). This also allows ACIL to outperform the state-of-the-art methods for large-phase scenarios (e.g., 25 and 50 phases).
Dynamic environments require adaptive applications. One particular machine learning problem in dynamic environments is open world recognition. It characterizes a continuously changing domain where only some classes are seen in one batch of the training data and such batches can only be learned incrementally. Open world recognition is a demanding task that is, to the best of our knowledge, addressed by only a few methods. This work introduces a modification of the widely known Extreme Value Machine (EVM) to enable open world recognition. Our proposed method extends the EVM with a partial model fitting function by neglecting unaffected space during an update. This reduces the training time by a factor of 28. In addition, we provide a modified model reduction using weighted maximum K-set cover to strictly bound the model complexity and reduce the computational effort by a factor of 3.5 from 2.1 s to 0.6 s. In our experiments, we rigorously evaluate openness with two novel evaluation protocols. The proposed method achieves superior accuracy of about 12 % and computational efficiency in the tasks of image classification and face recognition.
With the tremendous expansion of graphs data, node classification shows its great importance in many real-world applications. Existing graph neural network based methods mainly focus on classifying unlabeled nodes within fixed classes with abundant labeling. However, in many practical scenarios, graph evolves with emergence of new nodes and edges. Novel classes appear incrementally along with few labeling due to its newly emergence or lack of exploration. In this paper, we focus on this challenging but practical graph few-shot class-incremental learning (GFSCIL) problem and propose a novel method called Geometer. Instead of replacing and retraining the fully connected neural network classifer, Geometer predicts the label of a node by finding the nearest class prototype. Prototype is a vector representing a class in the metric space. With the pop-up of novel classes, Geometer learns and adjusts the attention-based prototypes by observing the geometric proximity, uniformity and separability. Teacher-student knowledge distillation and biased sampling are further introduced to mitigate catastrophic forgetting and unbalanced labeling problem respectively. Experimental results on four public datasets demonstrate that Geometer achieves a substantial improvement of 9.46% to 27.60% over state-of-the-art methods.