DCIGAN: A Distributed Class-Incremental Learning Method Based on Generative Adversarial Networks

Class incremental learning has received wide attention due to its better adaptability to the changing characteristics of online learning. However, data cannot be shared between organizations in the data isolated islands scenario. Existing solutions cannot adapt to incremental classes without aggregating data. In this paper, we propose a distributed class-incremental learning framework, called DCIGAN. It uses GAN generators to store the information of past data and continuously update GAN parameters with new data. In particular, we proposed CIGAN to ensure that the distribution of generated pseudo data is as close as possible to the real data on a single node, which guarantees the accuracy of class-incremental learning. Furthermore, we propose GF, a generators fusion method to integrate local generators of multi-nodes into a new global generator. To evaluate the performance of DCIGAN, we conduct experiments on six datasets under various parameter settings on both two and multi nodes distributed scenarios. Extensive experiments confirm that DCIGAN outperform the general baselines and achieve classification accuracy closes to the method of data aggregating.