Incremental learning targets at achieving good performance on new categories without forgetting old ones. Knowledge distillation has been shown critical in preserving the performance on old classes. Conventional methods, however, sequentially distill knowledge only from the last model, leading to performance degradation on the old classes in later incremental learning steps. In this paper, we propose a multi-model and multi-level knowledge distillation strategy. Instead of sequentially distilling knowledge only from the last model, we directly leverage all previous model snapshots. In addition, we incorporate an auxiliary distillation to further preserve knowledge encoded at the intermediate feature levels. To make the model more memory efficient, we adapt mask based pruning to reconstruct all previous models with a small memory footprint. Experiments on standard incremental learning benchmarks show that our method preserves the knowledge on old classes better and improves the overall performance over standard distillation techniques.

本文提出一种多模型和多级别知识蒸馏策略，通过直接利用之前的模型快照和辅助蒸馏等方式，在保留旧类知识的同时提升整体性能，有效解决了旧类性能下降的问题。

M2KD: 多模型、多层次知识蒸馏用于增量学习