Orchestrate Latent Expertise: Advancing Online Continual Learning with
  Multi-Level Supervision and Reverse Self-Distillation
HongWei Yan Liyuan Wang Kaisheng Ma Yi Zhong
To accommodate real-world dynamics, artificial intelligence systems need to
cope with sequentially arriving content in an online manner. Beyond regular
Continual Learning (CL) attempting to address catastrophic forgetting with
offline training of each task, Online Continual Learning (OCL) is a more
challenging yet realistic setting that performs CL in a one-pass data stream.
Current OCL methods primarily rely on memory replay of old training samples.
However, a notable gap from CL to OCL stems from the additional
overfitting-underfitting dilemma associated with the use of rehearsal buffers:
the inadequate learning of new training samples (underfitting) and the repeated
learning of a few old training samples (overfitting). To this end, we introduce
a novel approach, Multi-level Online Sequential Experts (MOSE), which
cultivates the model as stacked sub-experts, integrating multi-level
supervision and reverse self-distillation. Supervision signals across multiple
stages facilitate appropriate convergence of the new task while gathering
various strengths from experts by knowledge distillation mitigates the
performance decline of old tasks. MOSE demonstrates remarkable efficacy in
learning new samples and preserving past knowledge through multi-level experts,
thereby significantly advancing OCL performance over state-of-the-art baselines
(e.g., up to 7.3% on Split CIFAR-100 and 6.1% on Split Tiny-ImageNet).