A replay buffer selector that needs no training signal was 2.3 to 8.8 times faster than coreset baselines and beat the strongest one by up to 7.58 points under class imbalance
AspireAI community · arXiv (Shanbhag, Moser, Raue, Nauen & Dengel)
CARES picks which past samples to keep in a continual-learning replay buffer by exploiting the geometry of a frozen pretrained feature space with class-aware, density-weighted coverage, rather than the model-derived gradients and auxiliary optimisation that coreset methods use. The authors evaluate it across balanced, imbalanced and label-noisy streams under online class- and task-incremental settings, and report that on Tiny-ImageNet it is 2.3 to 8.8 times faster than existing coreset-based selectors while ranking among the state of the art, outperforming the strongest baseline by up to 7.58 percentage points under class imbalance and attaining higher average accuracy on Tiny-ImageNet. The point is that the speedup comes with no training signal from the continual learner at all, so a buffer can be maintained without repeatedly re-optimising the model. The limitation is straightforward and stated in the paper: the code will only be released upon publication, so unlike the competing methods it cannot be run and checked today.
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