Towards Continual Learning Desiderata via HSIC-Bottleneck
  Orthogonalization and Equiangular Embedding
Depeng Li Tianqi Wang Junwei Chen Qining Ren Kenji Kawaguchi Zhigang Zeng
Deep neural networks are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting when trained
on sequential tasks. Various continual learning (CL) methods often rely on
exemplar buffers or/and network expansion for balancing model stability and
plasticity, which, however, compromises their practical value due to privacy
and memory concerns. Instead, this paper considers a strict yet realistic
setting, where the training data from previous tasks is unavailable and the
model size remains relatively constant during sequential training. To achieve
such desiderata, we propose a conceptually simple yet effective method that
attributes forgetting to layer-wise parameter overwriting and the resulting
decision boundary distortion. This is achieved by the synergy between two key
components: HSIC-Bottleneck Orthogonalization (HBO) implements non-overwritten
parameter updates mediated by Hilbert-Schmidt independence criterion in an
orthogonal space and EquiAngular Embedding (EAE) enhances decision boundary
adaptation between old and new tasks with predefined basis vectors. Extensive
experiments demonstrate that our method achieves competitive accuracy
performance, even with absolute superiority of zero exemplar buffer and 1.02x
the base model.