Self-Evolved Dynamic Expansion Model for Task-Free Continual Learning

Task-Free Continual Learning (TFCL) aims to learn new concepts from a stream of data without any task information. The Dynamic Expansion Model (DEM) has shown promising results in TFCL by dynamically expanding the model's capacity to deal with shifts in the data distribution. However, existing approaches only consider the recognition of the input shift as the expansion signal and ignore the correlation between the newly incoming data and previously learned knowledge, resulting in adding and training unnecessary parameters. In this paper, we propose a novel and effective framework for TFCL, which dynamically expands the architecture of a DEM model through a self-assessment mechanism evaluating the diversity of knowledge among existing experts as expansion signals. This mechanism ensures learning additional underlying data distributions with a compact model structure. A novelty-aware sample selection approach is proposed to manage the memory buffer that forces the newly added expert to learn novel information from a data stream, which further promotes the diversity among experts. Moreover, we also propose to reuse previously learned representation information for learning new incoming data by using knowledge transfer in TFCL, which has not been explored before. The DEM expansion and training are regularized through a gradient updating mechanism to gradually explore the positive forward transfer, further improving the performance. Empirical results on TFCL benchmarks show that the proposed framework outperforms the state-of-the-art while using a reasonable number of parameters. The code is available at https://github.com/dtuzi123/SEDEM/ .