ConSept: Continual Semantic Segmentation via Adapter-based Vision
  Transformer
Bowen Dong Guanglei Yang Wangmeng Zuo Lei Zhang
In this paper, we delve into the realm of vision transformers for continual
semantic segmentation, a problem that has not been sufficiently explored in
previous literature. Empirical investigations on the adaptation of existing
frameworks to vanilla ViT reveal that incorporating visual adapters into ViTs
or fine-tuning ViTs with distillation terms is advantageous for enhancing the
segmentation capability of novel classes. These findings motivate us to propose
Continual semantic Segmentation via Adapter-based ViT, namely ConSept. Within
the simplified architecture of ViT with linear segmentation head, ConSept
integrates lightweight attention-based adapters into vanilla ViTs. Capitalizing
on the feature adaptation abilities of these adapters, ConSept not only retains
superior segmentation ability for old classes, but also attains promising
segmentation quality for novel classes. To further harness the intrinsic
anti-catastrophic forgetting ability of ConSept and concurrently enhance the
segmentation capabilities for both old and new classes, we propose two key
strategies: distillation with a deterministic old-classes boundary for improved
anti-catastrophic forgetting, and dual dice losses to regularize segmentation
maps, thereby improving overall segmentation performance. Extensive experiments
show the effectiveness of ConSept on multiple continual semantic segmentation
benchmarks under overlapped or disjoint settings. Code will be publicly
available at \url{https://github.com/DongSky/ConSept}.