Towards Cross-Domain Continual Learning (2402.12490v1)

Abstract: Continual learning is a process that involves training learning agents to sequentially master a stream of tasks or classes without revisiting past data. The challenge lies in leveraging previously acquired knowledge to learn new tasks efficiently, while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. Existing methods primarily focus on single domains, restricting their applicability to specific problems. In this work, we introduce a novel approach called Cross-Domain Continual Learning (CDCL) that addresses the limitations of being limited to single supervised domains. Our method combines inter- and intra-task cross-attention mechanisms within a compact convolutional network. This integration enables the model to maintain alignment with features from previous tasks, thereby delaying the data drift that may occur between tasks, while performing unsupervised cross-domain (UDA) between related domains. By leveraging an intra-task-specific pseudo-labeling method, we ensure accurate input pairs for both labeled and unlabeled samples, enhancing the learning process. To validate our approach, we conduct extensive experiments on public UDA datasets, showcasing its positive performance on cross-domain continual learning challenges. Additionally, our work introduces incremental ideas that contribute to the advancement of this field. We make our code and models available to encourage further exploration and reproduction of our results: \url{https://github.com/Ivsucram/CDCL}