Adversarial Robust Memory-Based Continual Learner

Despite the remarkable advances that have been made in continual learning, the adversarial vulnerability of such methods has not been fully discussed. We delve into the adversarial robustness of memory-based continual learning algorithms and observe limited robustness improvement by directly applying adversarial training techniques. Our preliminary studies reveal the twin challenges for building adversarial robust continual learners: \textbf{accelerated forgetting} in continual learning and \textbf{gradient obfuscation} in adversarial robustness. In this study, we put forward a novel adversarial robust memory-based continual learner that adjusts data logits to mitigate the forgetting of pasts caused by adversarial samples. Furthermore, we devise a gradient-based data selection mechanism to overcome the gradient obfuscation caused by limited stored data. The proposed approach can widely integrate with existing memory-based continual learning and adversarial training algorithms in a plug-and-play way. Extensive experiments on Split-CIFAR10/100 and Split-Tiny-ImageNet demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving a maximum forgetting reduction of 34.17% in adversarial data for ResNet, and 20.10% for ViT.