Incremental Concept Learning via Online Generative Memory Recall

The ability to learn more concepts from incrementally arriving data over time is essential for the development of a lifelong learning system. However, deep neural networks often suffer from forgetting previously learned concepts when continually learning new concepts, which is known as the catastrophic forgetting problem. The main reason for catastrophic forgetting is that past concept data are not available, and neural weights are changed during incrementally learning new concepts. In this article, we propose an incremental concept learning framework that includes two components, namely, ICLNet and RecallNet. ICLNet, which consists of a trainable feature extractor and a dynamic concept memory matrix, aims to learn new concepts incrementally. We propose a concept-contrastive loss to alleviate the magnitude of neural weight changes and mitigate the catastrophic forgetting problems. RecallNet aims to consolidate old concepts memory and recall pseudo samples, whereas ICLNet learns new concepts. We propose a balanced online memory recall strategy to reduce the information loss of old concept memory. We evaluate the proposed approach on the MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, and SVHN data sets and compare it with other pseudorehearsal-based approaches. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.