Preserving Locality in Vision Transformers for Class Incremental Learning

Learning new classes without forgetting is crucial for real-world applications for a classification model. Vision Transformers (ViT) recently achieve remarkable performance in Class Incremental Learning (CIL). Previous works mainly focus on block design and model expansion for ViTs. However, in this paper, we find that when the ViT is incrementally trained, the attention layers gradually lose concentration on local features. We call this interesting phenomenon as Locality Degradation in ViTs for CIL. Since the low-level local information is crucial to the transferability of the representation, it is beneficial to preserve the locality in attention layers. In this paper, we encourage the model to preserve more local information as the training procedure goes on and devise a Locality-Preserved Attention (LPA) layer to emphasize the importance of local features. Specifically, we incorporate the local information directly into the vanilla attention and control the initial gradients of the vanilla attention by weighting it with a small initial value. Extensive experiments show that the representations facilitated by LPA capture more low-level general information which is easier to transfer to follow-up tasks. The improved model gets consistently better performance on CIFAR100 and ImageNet100. The source code is available at https://github.com/bwnzheng/LPA_ICME2023.