Few-shot Continual Infomax Learning

Abstract

Few-shot continual learning is the ability to continually train a neural network from a sequential stream of few-shot data. In this paper, we propose a Few-shot Continual Infomax Learning (FCIL) framework that makes a deep model to continually/incrementally learn new concepts from few labeled samples, relieving the catastrophic forgetting of past knowledge. Specifically, inspired by the theoretical definition of transfer entropy, we introduce a feature embedding infomax to effectively perform the few-shot learning, which can transfer the strong encoding capability of the base network to learn the feature embedding of these novel classes by maximizing the mutual information of different-level feature distributions. Further, considering that the learned knowledge in the human brain is a generalization of actual information and exists in a certain relational structure, we perform continual structure infomax learning to relieve the catastrophic forgetting problem in the continual learning process. The information structure of this learned knowledge can be preserved through maximizing the mutual information across these continual-changing relations of inter-classes. Comprehensive evaluations on CIFAR100, miniImageNet, and CUB200 datasets demonstrate the superiority of our FCIL when compared against state-of-the-art methods on the few-shot continual learning task.