Bring Evanescent Representations to Life in Lifelong Class Incremental Learning

In Class Incremental Learning (CIL), a classification model is progressively trained at each incremental step on an evolving dataset of new classes, while at the same time, it is required to preserve knowledge of all the classes observed so far. Prototypical representations can be leveraged to model feature distribution for the past data and inject information of former classes in later incremental steps without resorting to stored exemplars. However, if not updated, those representations become increasingly outdated as the incremental learning progresses with new classes. To address the aforementioned problems, we propose a framework which aims to (i) model the semantic drift by learning the relationship between representations of past and novel classes among incremental steps, and (ii) estimate the feature drift, defined as the evolution of the representations learned by models at each incremental step. Semantic and feature drifts are then jointly exploited to infer up-to-date representations of past classes (evanescent representations), and thereby infuse past knowledge into incremental training. We experimentally evaluate our framework achieving exemplar-free SotA results on multiple benchmarks. In the ablation study, we investigate nontrivial relationships between evanescent representations and models.