Diversity enhancement and structure learning for rehearsal-based graph continual learning

Abstract

We investigate the replay buffer in rehearsal-based approaches for graph continual learning (GCL) methods. Existing rehearsal-based GCL methods select the most representative nodes for each class and store them in a replay buffer for later use in training subsequent tasks. However, we discovered that considering only the class representativeness of each replayed node makes the replayed nodes to be concentrated around the center of each class, incurring a potential risk of overfitting to nodes residing in those regions, which aggravates catastrophic forgetting. Moreover, as the rehearsal-based approach heavily relies on a few replayed nodes to retain knowledge obtained from previous tasks, involving the replayed nodes that have irrelevant neighbors in the model training may have a significant detrimental impact on model performance. In this paper, we propose a GCL model named Diversity enhancement and Structure Learning for Rehearsal-based graph continual learning (DSLR). Specifically, we devise a coverage-based diversity (CD) approach to consider both the class representativeness and the diversity within each class of the replayed nodes. Moreover, we adopt graph structure learning (GSL) to ensure that the replayed nodes are connected to truly informative neighbors. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of DSLR.