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Online Task-free Continual Learning with Dynamic Sparse Distributed Memory

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Computer Vision – ECCV 2022 (ECCV 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13685))

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Abstract

This paper addresses the very challenging problem of online task-free continual learning in which a sequence of new tasks is learned from non-stationary data using each sample only once for training and without knowledge of task boundaries. We propose in this paper an efficient semi-distributed associative memory algorithm called Dynamic Sparse Distributed Memory (DSDM) where learning and evaluating can be carried out at any point of time. DSDM evolves dynamically and continually modeling the distribution of any non-stationary data stream. DSDM relies on locally distributed, but only partially overlapping clusters of representations to effectively eliminate catastrophic forgetting, while at the same time, maintaining the generalization capacities of distributed networks. In addition, a local density-based pruning technique is used to control the network’s memory footprint. DSDM significantly outperforms state-of-the-art continual learning methods on different image classification baselines, even in a low data regime. Code is publicly available: https://github.com/Julien-pour/Dynamic-Sparse-Distributed-Memory.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. ETIS - CYU, ENSEA, CNRS, Paris, France

    Julien Pourcel & Ngoc-Son Vu

  2. LEAD - UBFC, CNRS, Paris, France

    Robert M. French

Authors
  1. Julien Pourcel
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  2. Ngoc-Son Vu
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  3. Robert M. French
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Correspondence to Julien Pourcel .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Shai Avidan

  2. University College London, London, UK

    Gabriel Brostow

  3. Google AI, Accra, Ghana

    Moustapha Cissé

  4. University of Catania, Catania, Italy

    Giovanni Maria Farinella

  5. Facebook (United States), Menlo Park, CA, USA

    Tal Hassner

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Pourcel, J., Vu, NS., French, R.M. (2022). Online Task-free Continual Learning with Dynamic Sparse Distributed Memory. In: Avidan, S., Brostow, G., Cissé, M., Farinella, G.M., Hassner, T. (eds) Computer Vision – ECCV 2022. ECCV 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13685. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19806-9_42

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