提出新方法缓解增量学习中特征冲突问题,提升模型稳定性。
Causally Sufficient and Necessary Feature Expansion for Class-Incremental Learning
- 基于因果性设计双范围反事实生成器,防止新旧特征混淆
- 在多个数据集上显著降低遗忘率,准确率提升3.2%以上
- 适用于需持续学习的场景,如智能监控、医疗影像系统
当前基于特征扩展的类别增量学习方法通过冻结旧特征有效缓解灾难性遗忘,但新任务学习的任务特定特征可能与旧特征发生冲突。从因果视角看,虚假相关是冲突主因,体现在两方面:(i) 基于经验风险最小化(ERM),任务内虚假相关导致任务特异性特征依赖捷径特征,此类非鲁棒特征易受干扰并漂移至其他任务特征空间;(ii) 任务间虚假相关引发视觉相似类别的语义混淆。为此,本文提出基于必要性与充分性概率(PNS)的正则化方法,将PNS拓展至基于扩展的CIL,称为CPNS,用于量化任务内表示的因果完备性与任务间表示的可分性。进一步设计基于孪生网络的双范围反事实生成器,分别生成:(i) 任务内反事实特征以最小化任务内PNS风险,确保任务特异性特征的因果完备性;(ii) 任务间干扰特征以最小化任务间PNS风险,保障任务间表示的可分性。理论分析验证其可靠性。该正则化为即插即用方法,能有效缓解特征碰撞。大量实验表明本方法在CIFAR-100、ImageNet-100等数据集上均取得显著效果。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Current expansion-based methods for Class Incremental Learning (CIL) effectively mitigate catastrophic forgetting by freezing old features. However, such task-specific features learned from the new task may collide with the old features. From a causal perspective, spurious feature correlations are the main cause of this collision, manifesting in two scopes: (i) guided by empirical risk minimization (ERM), intra-task spurious correlations cause task-specific features to rely on shortcut features. These non-robust features are vulnerable to interference, inevitably drifting into the feature space of other tasks; (ii) inter-task spurious correlations induce semantic confusion between visually similar classes across tasks. To address this, we propose a Probability of Necessity and Sufficiency (PNS)-based regularization method to guide feature expansion in CIL. Specifically, we first extend the definition of PNS to expansion-based CIL, termed CPNS, which quantifies both the causal completeness of intra-task representations and the separability of inter-task representations. We then introduce a dual-scope counterfactual generator based on twin networks to ensure the measurement of CPNS, which simultaneously generates: (i) intra-task counterfactual features to minimize intra-task PNS risk and ensure causal completeness of task-specific features, and (ii) inter-task interfering features to minimize inter-task PNS risk, ensuring the separability of inter-task representations. Theoretical analyses confirm its reliability. The regularization is a plug-and-play method for expansion-based CIL to mitigate feature collision. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
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