Instance and Category Supervision are Alternate Learners for Continual Learning

Xudong Tian, Zhizhong Zhang, Xin Tan, Jun Liu, Chengjie Wang, Yanyun Qu, Guannan Jiang, Yuan Xie; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023, pp. 5596-5605

Continual Learning (CL) is the constant development of complex behaviors by building upon previously acquired skills. Yet, current CL algorithms tend to incur class-level forgetting as the label information is often quickly overwritten by new knowledge. This motivates attempts to mine instance-level discrimination by resorting to recent self-supervised learning (SSL) techniques. However, previous works have pointed that the self-supervised learning objective is essentially a trade-off between invariance to distortion and preserving sample information, which seriously hinders the unleashing of instance-level discrimination. In this work, we reformulate SSL from the information-theoretic perspective by disentangling the goal of instance-level discrimination, and tackle the trade-off to promote compact representations with maximally preserved invariance to distortion. On this basis, we develop a novel alternate learning paradigm to enjoy the complementary merits of instance-level and category-level supervision, which yields improved robustness against forgetting and better adaptation to each task. To verify the proposed method, we conduct extensive experiments on four different benchmarks using both class-incremental and task-incremental settings, where the leap in performance and thorough ablation studies demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of our modeling strategy.