incDFM: Incremental Deep Feature Modeling for Continual Novelty Detection

Amanda Rios, Nilesh Ahuja, Ibrahima Ndiour, Utku Genc, Laurent Itti, Omesh Tickoo ;

"Novelty detection is a key capability for practical machine learning in the real world, where models operate in non-stationary conditions and are repeatedly exposed to new, unseen data. Yet, most current novelty detection approaches have been developed exclusively for static, offline use. They scale poorly under more realistic, continual learning regimes in which data distribution shifts occur. To address this critical gap, this paper proposes incDFM (incremental Deep Feature Modeling), a self-supervised continual novelty detector. The method builds a statistical model over the space of intermediate features produced by a deep network, and utilizes feature reconstruction errors as uncertainty scores to guide the detection of novel samples. Most importantly, incDFM estimates the statistical model incrementally (via several iterations within a task), instead of a single-shot. Each time it selects only the most confident novel samples which will then guide subsequent recruitment incrementally. For a certain task where the ML model encounters a mixture of old and novel data, the detector flags novel samples to incorporate them to old knowledge. Then the detector is updated with the flagged novel samples, in preparation for a next task. To quantify and benchmark performance, we adapted multiple datasets for continual learning: CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, SVHN, iNaturalist, and the 8-dataset. Our experiments show that incDFM achieves state of the art continual novelty detection performance. Furthermore, when examined in the greater context of continual learning for classification, our method is successful in minimizing catastrophic forgetting and error propagation."