Discriminative Representation Loss (DRL): A More Efficient Approach Than Gradient Re-projection in continual learning

The use of episodic memories in continual learning has been shown to be effective in terms of alleviating catastrophic forgetting. In recent studies, several gradientbased approaches have been developed to make more efficient use of compact episodic memories, which constrain the gradients resulting from new samples with those from memorized samples, aiming to reduce the diversity of gradients from different tasks. In this paper, we reveal the relation between diversity of gradients and discriminativeness of representations, demonstrating connections between Deep Metric Learning and continual learning. Based on these findings, we propose a simple yet highly efficient method - Discriminative Representation Loss (DRL) - for continual learning. In comparison with several state-of-theart methods, DRL shows effectiveness with low computational cost on multiple benchmark experiments in the setting of online continual learning. In the real world, we are often faced with situations where data distributions are changing over time, and we would like to update our models by new data in time, with bounded growth in system size. These situations fall under the umbrella of "continual learning", which has many practical applications, such as recommender systems, retail supply chain optimization, and robotics (Lesort et al., 2019; Diethe et al., 2018; Tian et al., 2018).