Fine-Grained Knowledge Selection and Restoration for Non-Exemplar Class
  Incremental Learning
Jiang-Tian Zhai Xialei Liu Lu Yu Ming-Ming Cheng
Non-exemplar class incremental learning aims to learn both the new and old
tasks without accessing any training data from the past. This strict
restriction enlarges the difficulty of alleviating catastrophic forgetting
since all techniques can only be applied to current task data. Considering this
challenge, we propose a novel framework of fine-grained knowledge selection and
restoration. The conventional knowledge distillation-based methods place too
strict constraints on the network parameters and features to prevent
forgetting, which limits the training of new tasks. To loose this constraint,
we proposed a novel fine-grained selective patch-level distillation to
adaptively balance plasticity and stability. Some task-agnostic patches can be
used to preserve the decision boundary of the old task. While some patches
containing the important foreground are favorable for learning the new task.
  Moreover, we employ a task-agnostic mechanism to generate more realistic
prototypes of old tasks with the current task sample for reducing classifier
bias for fine-grained knowledge restoration. Extensive experiments on CIFAR100,
TinyImageNet and ImageNet-Subset demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
Code is available at https://github.com/scok30/vit-cil.