# An Attention-based Representation Distillation Baseline for Multi-Label Continual Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.14249 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14249/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 29 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 19 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 29 of 29)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Learning without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.09282/) (2016)
- [iCaRL: Incremental Classifier and Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07725/) (2016)
- [Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08840/) (2017)
- [Continual Lifelong Learning with Neural Networks: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07569/) (2018)
- [Efficient Lifelong Learning with A-GEM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.00420/) (2018)
- [Learning to Prompt for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08654/) (2021)
- [Dark Experience for General Continual Learning: a Strong, Simple Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07211/) (2020)
- [Riemannian Walk for Incremental Learning: Understanding Forgetting and Intransigence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.10112/) (2018)
- [DualPrompt: Complementary Prompting for Rehearsal-free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.04799/) (2022)
- [Gradient based sample selection for online continual learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08671/) (2019)
- [CODA-Prompt: COntinual Decomposed Attention-based Prompting for Rehearsal-Free Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13218/) (2022)
- [WebVision Database: Visual Learning and Understanding from Web Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02862/) (2017)
- [New Insights on Reducing Abrupt Representation Change in Online Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05025/) (2021)
- [Towards Robust Evaluations of Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09733/) (2018)
- [An Empirical Investigation of the Role of Pre-training in Lifelong Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09153/) (2021)
- [Imbalanced Continual Learning with Partitioning Reservoir Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03632/) (2020)
- [Knowledge Distillation via the Target-aware Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10793/) (2022)
- [DearKD: Data-Efficient Early Knowledge Distillation for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12997/) (2022)
- [Transfer without Forgetting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00388/) (2022)
- [ViTKD: Practical Guidelines for ViT feature knowledge distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02432/) (2022)
- [IIRC: Incremental Implicitly-Refined Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12477/) (2020)
- [Multi-label Iterated Learning for Image Classification with Label Ambiguity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.12172/) (2021)
- [On the Effectiveness of Equivariant Regularization for Robust Online Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03648/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The field of Continual Learning (CL) has inspired numerous researchers over the years, leading to increasingly advanced countermeasures to the issue of catastrophic forgetting. Most studies have focused on the single-class scenario, where each example comes with a single label. The recent literature has successfully tackled such a setting, with impressive results. Differently, we shift our attention to the multi-label scenario, as we feel it to be more representative of real-world open problems. In our work, we show that existing state-of-the-art CL methods fail to achieve satisfactory performance, thus questioning the real advance claimed in recent years. Therefore, we assess both old-style and novel strategies and propose, on top of them, an approach called Selective Class Attention Distillation (SCAD). It relies on a knowledge transfer technique that seeks to align the representations of the student network -- which trains continuously and is subject to forgetting -- with the teacher ones, which is pretrained and kept frozen. Importantly, our method is able to selectively transfer the relevant information from the teacher to the student, thereby preventing irrelevant information from harming the student's performance during online training. To demonstrate the merits of our approach, we conduct experiments on two different multi-label datasets, showing that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art Continual Learning methods. Our findings highlight the importance of addressing the unique challenges posed by multi-label environments in the field of Continual Learning. The code of SCAD is available at https://github.com/aimagelab/SCAD-LOD-2024.