Cross-Modal Alternating Learning with Task-Aware Representations for Continual Learning

Continual learning is a research field of artificial neural networks to simulate human lifelong learning ability. Although a surge of investigations has achieved considerable performance, most rely only on image modality for incremental image recognition tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel yet effective framework coined cross-modal Alternating Learning with Task-Aware representations (ALTA) to make good use of visual and linguistic modal information and achieve more effective continual learning. To do so, ALTA presents a cross-modal joint learning mechanism that leverages simultaneous learning of image and text representations to provide more effective supervision. And it mitigates forgetting by endowing task-aware representations with continual learning capability. Concurrently, considering the dilemma of stability and plasticity, ALTA proposes a cross-modal alternating learning strategy that alternately learns the task-aware cross-modal representations to match the image-text pairs between tasks better, further enhancing the ability of continual learning. We conduct extensive experiments under various popular image classification benchmarks to demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. At the same time, systematic ablation studies and visualization analyses validate the effectiveness and rationality of our method. Our code will be available upon publication.