CBA: Improving Online Continual Learning via Continual Bias Adaptor
Quanziang Wang Renzhen Wang Yichen Wu Xixi Jia Deyu Meng
Online continual learning (CL) aims to learn new knowledge and consolidate
previously learned knowledge from non-stationary data streams. Due to the
time-varying training setting, the model learned from a changing distribution
easily forgets the previously learned knowledge and biases toward the newly
received task. To address this problem, we propose a Continual Bias Adaptor
(CBA) module to augment the classifier network to adapt to catastrophic
distribution change during training, such that the classifier network is able
to learn a stable consolidation of previously learned tasks. In the testing
stage, CBA can be removed which introduces no additional computation cost and
memory overhead. We theoretically reveal the reason why the proposed method can
effectively alleviate catastrophic distribution shifts, and empirically
demonstrate its effectiveness through extensive experiments based on four
rehearsal-based baselines and three public continual learning benchmarks.