Continual Learning With Lifelong Vision Transformer

Zhen Wang, Liu Liu, Yiqun Duan, Yajing Kong, Dacheng Tao; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2022, pp. 171-181

Continual learning methods aim at training a neural network from sequential data with streaming labels, relieving catastrophic forgetting. However, existing methods are based on and designed for convolutional neural networks (CNNs), which have not utilized the full potential of newly emerged powerful vision transformers. In this paper, we propose a novel attention-based framework Lifelong Vision Transformer (LVT), to achieve a better stability-plasticity trade-off for continual learning. Specifically, an inter-task attention mechanism is presented in LVT, which implicitly absorbs the previous tasks' information and slows down the drift of important attention between previous tasks and the current task. LVT designs a dual-classifier structure that independently injects new representation to avoid catastrophic interference and accumulates the new and previous knowledge in a balanced manner to improve the overall performance. Moreover, we develop a confidence-aware memory update strategy to deepen the impression of the previous tasks. The extensive experimental results show that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with even fewer parameters on continual learning benchmarks.