SimCS: Simulation for Domain Incremental Online Continual Segmentation

Abstract

Continual Learning is a step towards lifelong intelligence where models continuously learn from recently collected data without forgetting previous knowledge. Existing continual learning approaches mostly focus on image classification in the class-incremental setup with clear task boundaries and unlimited computational budget. This work explores Online Domain-Incremental Continual Segmentation~(ODICS), a real-world problem that arises in many applications, \eg, autonomous driving. In ODICS, the model is continually presented with batches of densely labeled images from different domains; computation is limited and no information about the task boundaries is available. In autonomous driving, this may correspond to the realistic scenario of training a segmentation model over time on a sequence of cities. We analyze several existing continual learning methods and show that they do not perform well in this setting despite working well in class-incremental segmentation. We propose SimCS, a parameter-free method complementary to existing ones that leverages simulated data as a continual learning regularizer. Extensive experiments show consistent improvements over different types of continual learning methods that use regularizers and even replay.

Publication
In AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Motasem Alfarra
Motasem Alfarra
PhD Candidate - Electrical and Computer Engineering

I am a Ph.D. candidate at KAUST in Saudi Arabia. I am part of the Image and Video Understanding Lab (IVUL) advised by Prof. Bernard Ghanem. I obtained my M.Sc degree in Electrical Engineering from KAUST, and my undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Kuwait University. I am interested in test-time adaptation and continual learning. Previously, I worked on assessing and enhancing network robustness and leveraging robust models for different applications.