Abstract
The goal of continual learning (CL) is to learn a sequence of tasks
without suffering from the phenomenon of catastrophic forgetting.
Previous work has shown that leveraging memory in the form of a replay
buffer can reduce performance degradation on prior tasks. We hypothesize
that forgetting can be further reduced when the model is encouraged to
remember the evidence for previously made decisions. As a first
step towards exploring this hypothesis, we propose a simple novel
training paradigm, called Remembering for the Right Reasons (RRR), that
additionally stores visual model explanations for each example in the
buffer and ensures the model has “the right reasons” for its
predictions by encouraging its explanations to remain consistent with
those used to make decisions at training time. Without this constraint,
there is a drift in explanations and increase in forgetting as
conventional continual learning algorithms learn new tasks. We
demonstrate how RRR can be easily added to any memory or
regularization-based approach and results in reduced forgetting, and
more importantly, improved model explanations. We have evaluated our
approach in the standard and few-shot settings and observed a consistent
improvement across various CL approaches using different architectures
and techniques to generate model explanations and demonstrated our
approach showing a promising connection between explainability and
continual learning. Our code is available at
\url{https://github.com/SaynaEbrahimi/Remembering-for-the-Right-Reasons}