DKT: Diverse Knowledge Transfer Transformer for Class Incremental Learning

In the context of incremental class learning, deep neural networks are prone to catastrophic forgetting, where the accuracy of old classes declines substantially as new knowledge is learned. While recent studies have sought to address this issue, most approaches suffer from either the stability-plasticity dilemma or excessive computational and parameter requirements. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel framework, the Diverse Knowledge Transfer Transformer (DKT), which incorporates two knowledge transfer mechanisms that use attention mechanisms to transfer both task-specific and task-general knowledge to the current task, along with a duplex classifier to address the stability-plasticity dilemma. Additionally, we design a loss function that clusters similar categories and discriminates between old and new tasks in the feature space. The proposed method requires only a small number of extra parameters, which are negligible in comparison to the increasing number of tasks. We perform extensive experiments on CIFAR100, ImageNet100, and ImageNet1000 datasets, which demonstrate that our method outperforms other competitive methods and achieves state-of-the-art performance. Our source code is available at https://github.com/MIVXJTU/DKT.