Learning Equi-angular Representations for Online Continual Learning

Online continual learning suffers from an underfitted solution due to insufficient training for prompt model update (e.g., single-epoch training). To address the challenge, we propose an efficient online continual learning method using the neural collapse phenomenon. In particular, we induce neural collapse to form a simplex equiangular tight frame (ETF) structure in the representation space so that the continuously learned model with a single epoch can better fit to the streamed data by proposing preparatory data training and residual correction in the representation space. With an extensive set of empirical validations using CIFAR-10/100, TinyImageNet, ImageNet-200, and ImageNet-1K, we show that our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by a noticeable margin in various online continual learning scenarios such as disjoint and Gaussian scheduled continuous (i.e., boundary-free) data setups.

Long-Tailed Recognition on Binary Networks by Calibrating A Pre-trained Model

Deploying deep models in real-world scenarios entails a number of challenges, including computational efficiency and real-world (e.g., long-tailed) data distributions. We address the combined challenge of learning long-tailed distributions using highly resource-efficient binary neural networks as backbones. Specifically, we propose a calibrate-and-distill framework that uses off-the-shelf pretrained full-precision models trained on balanced datasets to use as teachers for distillation when learning binary networks on long-tailed datasets. To better generalize to various datasets, we further propose a novel adversarial balancing among the terms in the objective function and an efficient multiresolution learning scheme. We conducted the largest empirical study in the literature using 15 datasets, including newly derived long-tailed datasets from existing balanced datasets, and show that our proposed method outperforms prior art by large margins (>14.33% on average).

Just Say the Name: Online Continual Learning with Category Names Only via Data Generation

In real-world scenarios, extensive manual annotation for continual learning is impractical due to prohibitive costs. Although prior arts, influenced by large-scale webly supervised training, suggest leveraging web-scraped data in continual learning, this poses challenges such as data imbalance, usage restrictions, and privacy concerns. Addressing the risks of continual webly supervised training, we present an online continual learning framework - Generative Name only Continual Learning (G-NoCL). The proposed G-NoCL uses a set of generators G along with the learner. When encountering new concepts (i.e., classes), G-NoCL employs the novel sample complexity-guided data ensembling technique DIverSity and COmplexity enhancing ensemBlER (DISCOBER) to optimally sample training data from generated data. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate superior performance of DISCOBER in G-NoCL online CL benchmarks, covering both In-Distribution (ID) and Out-of-Distribution (OOD) generalization evaluations, compared to naive generator-ensembling, web-supervised, and manually annotated data.

Online Continual Learning For Interactive Instruction Following Agents

In learning an embodied agent executing daily tasks via language directives, the literature largely assumes that the agent learns all training data at the beginning. We argue that such a learning scenario is less realistic since a robotic agent is supposed to learn the world continuously as it explores and perceives it. To take a step towards a more realistic embodied agent learning scenario, we propose two continual learning setups for embodied agents; learning new behaviors (Behavior Incremental Learning, Behavior-IL) and new environments (Environment Incremental Learning, Environment-IL) For the tasks, previous 'data prior' based continual learning methods maintain logits for the past tasks. However, the stored information is often insufficiently learned information and requires task boundary information, which might not always be available. Here, we propose to update them based on confidence scores without task boundary information during training (i.e., task-free) in a moving average fashion, named Confidence-Aware Moving Average (CAMA). In the proposed Behavior-IL and Environment-IL setups, our simple CAMA outperforms prior state of the art in our empirical validations by noticeable margins. The project page including codes is https://github.com/snumprlab/cl-alfred.

PAC-FNO: Parallel-Structured All-Component Fourier Neural Operators for Recognizing Low-Quality Images

A standard practice in developing image recognition models is to train a model on a specific image resolution and then deploy it. However, in real-world inference, models often encounter images different from the training sets in resolution and/or subject to natural variations such as weather changes, noise types and compression artifacts. While traditional solutions involve training multiple models for different resolutions or input variations, these methods are computationally expensive and thus do not scale in practice. To this end, we propose a novel neural network model, parallel-structured and all-component Fourier neural operator (PAC-FNO), that addresses the problem. Unlike conventional feed-forward neural networks, PAC-FNO operates in the frequency domain, allowing it to handle images of varying resolutions within a single model. We also propose a two-stage algorithm for training PAC-FNO with a minimal modification to the original, downstream model. Moreover, the proposed PAC-FNO is ready to work with existing image recognition models. Extensively evaluating methods with seven image recognition benchmarks, we show that the proposed PAC-FNO improves the performance of existing baseline models on images with various resolutions by up to 77.1% and various types of natural variations in the images at inference.

Tuning Large Multimodal Models for Videos using Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback

Recent advancements in large language models have influenced the development of video large multimodal models (VLMMs). The previous approaches for VLMMs involved Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) with instruction-tuned datasets, integrating LLM with visual encoders, and adding additional learnable modules. Video and text multimodal alignment remains challenging, primarily due to the deficient volume and quality of multimodal instruction-tune data compared to text-only data. We present a novel alignment strategy that employs multimodal AI system to oversee itself called Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF), providing self-preference feedback to refine itself and facilitating the alignment of video and text modalities. In specific, we propose context-aware reward modeling by providing detailed video descriptions as context during the generation of preference feedback in order to enrich the understanding of video content. Demonstrating enhanced performance across diverse video benchmarks, our multimodal RLAIF approach, VLM-RLAIF, outperforms existing approaches, including the SFT model. We commit to open-sourcing our code, models, and datasets to foster further research in this area.

Operator-learning-inspired Modeling of Neural Ordinary Differential Equations

Neural ordinary differential equations (NODEs), one of the most influential works of the differential equation-based deep learning, are to continuously generalize residual networks and opened a new field. They are currently utilized for various downstream tasks, e.g., image classification, time series classification, image generation, etc. Its key part is how to model the time-derivative of the hidden state, denoted dh(t)/dt. People have habitually used conventional neural network architectures, e.g., fully-connected layers followed by non-linear activations. In this paper, however, we present a neural operator-based method to define the time-derivative term. Neural operators were initially proposed to model the differential operator of partial differential equations (PDEs). Since the time-derivative of NODEs can be understood as a special type of the differential operator, our proposed method, called branched Fourier neural operator (BFNO), makes sense. In our experiments with general downstream tasks, our method significantly outperforms existing methods.

Online Continual Learning on Hierarchical Label Expansion

Continual learning (CL) enables models to adapt to new tasks and environments without forgetting previously learned knowledge. While current CL setups have ignored the relationship between labels in the past task and the new task with or without small task overlaps, real-world scenarios often involve hierarchical relationships between old and new tasks, posing another challenge for traditional CL approaches. To address this challenge, we propose a novel multi-level hierarchical class incremental task configuration with an online learning constraint, called hierarchical label expansion (HLE). Our configuration allows a network to first learn coarse-grained classes, with data labels continually expanding to more fine-grained classes in various hierarchy depths. To tackle this new setup, we propose a rehearsal-based method that utilizes hierarchy-aware pseudo-labeling to incorporate hierarchical class information. Additionally, we propose a simple yet effective memory management and sampling strategy that selectively adopts samples of newly encountered classes. Our experiments demonstrate that our proposed method can effectively use hierarchy on our HLE setup to improve classification accuracy across all levels of hierarchies, regardless of depth and class imbalance ratio, outperforming prior state-of-the-art works by significant margins while also outperforming them on the conventional disjoint, blurry and i-Blurry CL setups.

Context-Aware Planning and Environment-Aware Memory for Instruction Following Embodied Agents

Accomplishing household tasks requires to plan step-by-step actions considering the consequences of previous actions. However, the state-of-the-art embodied agents often make mistakes in navigating the environment and interacting with proper objects due to imperfect learning by imitating experts or algorithmic planners without such knowledge. To improve both visual navigation and object interaction, we propose to consider the consequence of taken actions by CAPEAM (Context-Aware Planning and Environment-Aware Memory) that incorporates semantic context (e.g., appropriate objects to interact with) in a sequence of actions, and the changed spatial arrangement and states of interacted objects (e.g., location that the object has been moved to) in inferring the subsequent actions. We empirically show that the agent with the proposed CAPEAM achieves state-of-the-art performance in various metrics using a challenging interactive instruction following benchmark in both seen and unseen environments by large margins (up to +10.70% in unseen env.).