This repository contains the codebase for reproducing the results of our paper "Knowledge Accumulation in Continually Learned Representations and the Issue of Feature Forgetting", accepted to TMLR 2024.

Please see our paper for a detailed description of this work: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.00933

We also provide a video covering the main points of our paper here:

This code uses

• Python 3.8
• Avalanche 0.1.0 (library code included in this repository)*
• PyTorch 2.0.1

To setup your python environmet we provide a conda_environment.yml that mirrors our Anaconda packages. Please use the following bash command:

conda env create -n KAaFF --file conda_environment.yml
conda activate KAaFF

* extended by DER according to Avalanche 0.4.0a. Time constraints prevented a full migration to the latest version at this point. We hope to deliver an update in the future.

The specific configurations for the experimentation can be found in reproduce/configs. The yaml configuration files contain all hyper-parameter configurations we used for the experiments found in our paper. However, system specific paramters, e.g. path-to-datasets, experiment nameing, seed, you will need to provide for your run: For example:

python train.py --save_path ./results/ --dset_rootpath ./cifar100/ --num_experiences 10 --eval_max_iterations 0 --config_path ./reproduce/configs/cifar100/{CONFIG}.yml

For convenice, we also added a bash file that runs all seeds and respective "exclusion" experiments. Note that this takes some time.

bash ./reproduce/reproduce_experiment.sh --yaml_config {yaml-config-file} --exp_name {some-name} --dset_rootpath {path-to-dataset} --save_path {path-to-store-results-to}

# e.g. bash ./reproduce/reproduce_experiment.sh --yaml_config ./reproduce/configs/cifar100/cifar100_adamW_finetune_augmentations.yml --exp_name ft_adamW_aug --dset_rootpath ./cifar100/ --save_path ./results/

We did not run with deterministic CUDNN backbone for computational efficiency, which might result in small deviations in results. We average all results over 5 initialization seeds, these can be found in the yaml files.

At this point, we only support Tensorboard visualizations. To view results for Tensorboard, run:

tensorboard --logdir=OUTPUT_DIR

@inproceedings{hess2023knowledge,
  title={Knowledge accumulation in continually learned representations and the issue of feature forgetting},
  author={Hess, Timm and Verwimp, Eli and van de Ven, Gido M and Tuytelaars, Tinne},
  journal={Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR)},
  year={2024},
  url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=aHtZuZfHcf}
}

Code is available under MIT license: A short and simple permissive license with conditions only requiring preservation of copyright and license notices.

As a full disclaimer we acknowledge this code-base originated as a fork of https://github.com/Mattdl/ContinualEvaluation and thank the original authors for their open-source contribution. However, our work is not further connected.