Interactive Continual Learning: Fast and Slow Thinking
Authors: Biqing Qi, Xinquan Chen, Junqi Gao, Dong Li, Jianxing Liu, Ligang Wu, Bowen Zhou

Advanced life forms sustained by the synergistic interaction of neural cognitive mechanisms continually acquire and transfer knowledge throughout their lifespan. In contrast contemporary machine learning paradigms exhibit limitations in emulating the facets of continual learning (CL). Nonetheless the emergence of large language models (LLMs) presents promising avenues for realizing CL via interactions with these models. Drawing on Complementary Learning System theory this paper presents a novel Interactive Continual Learning (ICL) framework enabled by collaborative interactions among models of various sizes. Specifically we assign the ViT model as System1 and multimodal LLM as System2. To enable the memory module to deduce tasks from class information and enhance Set2Set retrieval we propose the Class-Knowledge-Task Multi-Head Attention (CKT-MHA). Additionally to improve memory retrieval in System1 through enhanced geometric representation we introduce the CL-vMF mechanism based on the von Mises-Fisher (vMF) distribution. Meanwhile we introduce the von Mises-Fisher Outlier Detection and Interaction (vMF-ODI) strategy to identify hard examples thus enhancing collaboration between System1 and System2 for complex reasoning realization. Comprehensive evaluation of our proposed ICL demonstrates significant resistance to forgetting and superior performance relative to existing methods. Code is available at github.com/ICL.