  We propose an approach without any forgetting to continual learning for the
task-aware regime, where at inference the task-label is known. By using ternary
masks we can upgrade a model to new tasks, reusing knowledge from previous
tasks while not forgetting anything about them. Using masks prevents both
catastrophic forgetting and backward transfer. We argue -- and show
experimentally -- that avoiding the former largely compensates for the lack of
the latter, which is rarely observed in practice. In contrast to earlier works,
our masks are applied to the features (activations) of each layer instead of
the weights. This considerably reduces the number of mask parameters for each
new task; with more than three orders of magnitude for most networks. The
encoding of the ternary masks into two bits per feature creates very little
overhead to the network, avoiding scalability issues. To allow already learned
features to adapt to the current task without changing the behavior of these
features for previous tasks, we introduce task-specific feature normalization.
Extensive experiments on several finegrained datasets and ImageNet show that
our method outperforms current state-of-the-art while reducing memory overhead
in comparison to weight-based approaches.

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition