Continual Variational Autoencoder via Continual Generative Knowledge Distillation

Humans and other living beings have the ability of short and long-term memorization during their entire lifespan. However, most existing Continual Learning (CL) methods can only account for short-term information when training on infinite streams of data. In this paper, we develop a new unsupervised continual learning framework consisting of two memory systems using Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). We develop a Short-Term Memory (STM), and a parameterised scalable memory implemented by a Teacher model aiming to preserve the long-term information. To incrementally enrich the Teacher's knowledge during training, we propose the Knowledge Incremental Assimilation Mechanism (KIAM), which evaluates the knowledge similarity between the STM and the already accumulated information as signals to expand the Teacher's capacity. Then we train a VAE as a Student module and propose a new Knowledge Distillation (KD) approach that gradually transfers generative knowledge from the Teacher to the Student module. To ensure the quality and diversity of knowledge in KD, we propose a new expert pruning approach that selectively removes the Teacher's redundant parameters, associated with unnecessary experts which have learnt overlapping information with other experts. This mechanism further reduces the complexity of the Teacher's module while ensuring the diversity of knowledge for the KD procedure. We show theoretically and empirically that the proposed framework can train a statistically diversified Teacher module for continual VAE learning which is applicable to learning infinite data streams.