Ex-model continual learning is a setting where a stream of experts (i.e. model's parameters) is available and a continual learning model learns from them without access to the original data.
This is based on our recent work on continual learning from pretrained models. This repository provides a snapshot of the codebase at the time of publication. If you want to test your own strategies, the benchmarks and pretrained models are available directly in Avalanche, and you should use them instead of this repository.
We plan to add also the Ex-Model Distillation inside Avalanche in the future.
NOTE: This repository is a heavy refactoring of the original codebase which was used to run the experiment. The refactoring was necessary to make it easier to understand and reuse by other researchers. However, due to the high variance of the experiements, there may be slight differences in the results compared to the paper.
The module exmodel
follows Avalanche's structure:
- benchmarks:
ExModelScenario
adds an attributetrained_models
to the benchmarks. The originaltrain_stream
andtest_stream
are available for evaluation purposes (they are assumed private by the scenario). - models: custom
nn.Module
s and baseline architectures used in the experiments. - evaluation: loggers and metrics.
- training: training algorithms. The ex-model distillation strategy is here.
The folder experiments
contains the code to run the experiments. The main is in launcher.py
, while the training function is in train_ex_model.py
.
conda env create -f environment.yml
avalanche must be installed separately.
This repository used Avalanche pre-release, commit a299bd4
.
to launch an experiment run:
python experiments/launcher.py --config CONFIGS/debug.yaml
The directory CONFIGS
contains the configuration already setup for you.
To run the experiments you may need to change the logs and data folders in the CONFIGS
yaml files.
The table printed by the rich-based logger sometimes misalign metric values (when there are missing values). The textual logger and json files are all correct.
If you find this useful consider citing:
Carta, A., Cossu, A., Lomonaco, V., & Bacciu, D. (2021). Ex-Model: Continual Learning from a Stream of Trained Models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.06511.
bibtex:
@article{carta2021ex,
title={Ex-Model: Continual Learning from a Stream of Trained Models},
author={Carta, Antonio and Cossu, Andrea and Lomonaco, Vincenzo and Bacciu, Davide},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.06511},
year={2021}
}