Achieving backward compatibility when rolling out new models can highly reduce costs or even bypass feature re-encoding of existing gallery images for in-production visual retrieval systems. Previous related works usually leverage losses used in knowledge distillation which can cause performance degradations or not guarantee compatibility. To address these issues, we propose a general framework called Learning Compatible Embeddings (LCE) which is applicable for both cross model compatibility and compatible training in direct/forward/backward manners. Our compatibility is achieved by aligning class centers between models directly or via a transformation, and restricting more compact intra-class distributions for the new model. Experiments are conducted in extensive scenarios such as changes of training dataset, loss functions, network architectures as well as feature dimensions, and demonstrate that LCE efficiently enables model compatibility with marginal sacrifices of accuracies. The code will be available at https://github.com/IrvingMeng/LCE.
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