Analogical Augmentation and Significance Analysis for Online Task-Free Continual Learning

Online task-free continual learning (OTFCL) is a more challenging variant of continual learning that emphasizes the gradual shift of task boundaries and learning in an online mode. Existing methods rely on a memory buffer of old samples to prevent forgetting. However, the use of memory buffers not only raises privacy concerns but also hinders the efficient learning of new samples. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework called I²CANSAY that gets rid of the dependence on memory buffers and efficiently learns the knowledge of new data from one-shot samples. Concretely, our framework comprises two main modules. Firstly, the Inter-Class Analogical Augmentation (ICAN) module generates diverse pseudo-features for old classes based on the inter-class analogy of feature distributions for different new classes, serving as a substitute for the memory buffer. Secondly, the Intra-Class Significance Analysis (ISAY) module analyzes the significance of attributes for each class via its distribution standard deviation, and generates an importance vector as a correction bias for the linear classifier, thereby enhancing the capability of learning from new samples. We run our experiments on four popular image classification datasets: CoRe50, CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and CUB-200, our approach outperforms the prior state-of-the-art by a large margin.