Continual learning is the problem of learning and retaining knowledge through time over multiple tasks and environments. Research has primarily focused on the incremental classification setting, where new tasks/classes are added at discrete time intervals. Such an "offline" setting does not evaluate the ability of agents to learn effectively and efficiently, since an agent can perform multiple learning epochs without any time limitation when a task is added. We argue that "online" continual learning, where data is a single continuous stream without task boundaries, enables evaluating both information retention and online learning efficacy. In online continual learning, each incoming small batch of data is first used for testing and then added to the training set, making the problem truly online. Trained models are later evaluated on historical data to assess information retention. We introduce a new benchmark for online continual visual learning that exhibits large scale and natural distribution shifts. Through a large-scale analysis, we identify critical and previously unobserved phenomena of gradient-based optimization in continual learning, and propose effective strategies for improving gradient-based online continual learning with real data. The source code and dataset are available in: https://github.com/IntelLabs/continuallearning.

该研究论文提出一种新的基于连续数据流的在线不断学习方法，并建立了一个大规模的在线视觉学习基准测试，研究了梯度下降优化在不断学习中的关键未被观察到的现象，并提出有效的策略来改进深度学习模型的性能。

自然分布偏移下的在线持续学习：基于视觉数据的实证研究