Information Bottleneck Based Data Correction in Continual Learning

Abstract

Continual Learning (CL) requires model to retain previously learned knowledge while learning new tasks. Recently, experience replay-based methods have made significant progress in addressing this challenge. These methods primarily select data from old tasks and store them in a buffer. When learning new task, they train the model using both the current and buffered data. However, the limited number of old data can lead to the model being influenced by new tasks. The repeated replaying of buffer data and the gradual discarding of old task data (unsampled data) also result in a biased estimation of the model towards the old tasks, causing overfitting issues. All these factors can affect the CL performance. Therefore, we propose a data correction algorithm based on the Information Bottleneck (IBCL) to enhance the performance of the replay-based CL system. This algorithm comprises two components: the Information Bottleneck Task Agnostic Constraints (IBTA), which encourages the buffer data to learn task-relevant features related to the old tasks, thereby reducing the impact of new tasks. The Information Bottleneck Unsampled Data Surrogate (IBDS), which models the information of the unsampled data in the old tasks to alleviate data bias. Our method can be flexibly combined with most existing experience replay methods. We have verified the effectiveness of our method through a series of experiments, demonstrating its potential for improving the performance of CL algorithms.