Contemporary neural networks are limited in their ability to learn from evolving streams of training data. When trained sequentially on new or evolving tasks, their accuracy drops sharply, making them unsuitable for many real-world applications. In this work, we shed light on the causes of this well-known yet unsolved phenomenon - often referred to as catastrophic forgetting - in a class-incremental setup. We show that a combination of simple components and a loss that balances intra-task and inter-task learning can already resolve forgetting to the same extent as more complex measures proposed in literature. Moreover, we identify poor quality of the learned representation as another reason for catastrophic forgetting in class-IL. We show that performance is correlated with secondary class information (dark knowledge) learned by the model and it can be improved by an appropriate regularizer. With these lessons learned, class-incremental learning results on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet improve over the state-of-the-art by a large margin, while keeping the approach simple.

研究表明，使用简单的组件和一个平衡内部和外部任务学习的损失函数组合已经可以解决神经网络在新任务上学习所导致的经典遗忘现象。同时，报道了在类增量学习中，表示品质较差是另一个使经典遗忘现象出现的原因，并通过适当的正则化程序改进了性能。在这些发现的基础上，研究结果在CIFAR-100和ImageNet上均取得了国际领先的成果，方法简单易实现。

班级增量学习的要素