An official website of the United States government
Supervised Continual learning involves updating a deep neural network (DNN) from an ever-growing stream of labeled data. While most work has focused on overcoming catastrophic forgetting, one of the major motivations behind continual learning is being able to efficiently update a network with new information, rather than retraining from scratch on the training dataset as it grows over time. Despite recent continual learning methods largely solving the catastrophic forgetting problem, there has been little attention paid to the efficiency of these algorithms. Here, we study recent methods for incremental class learning and illustrate that many are highly inefficient in terms of compute, memory, and storage. Some methods even require more compute than training from scratch! We argue that for continual learning to have real-world applicability, the research community cannot ignore the resources used by these algorithms. There is more to continual learning than mitigating catastrophic forgetting.
more »
« less
Incremental Learning via Rate Reduction
Current deep learning architectures suffer from catastrophic forgetting, a failure to retain knowledge of previously learned classes when incrementally trained on new classes. The fundamental roadblock faced by deep learning methods is that the models are optimized as “black boxes,” making it difficult to properly adjust the model parameters to preserve knowledge about previously seen data. To overcome the problem of catastrophic forgetting, we propose utilizing an alternative “white box” architecture derived from the principle of rate reduction, where each layer of the network is explicitly computed without back propagation. Under this paradigm, we demonstrate that, given a pretrained network and new data classes, our approach can provably construct a new network that emulates joint training with all past and new classes. Finally, our experiments show that our proposed learning algorithm observes significantly less decay in classification performance, outperforming state of the art methods on MNIST and CIFAR-10 by a large margin and justifying the use of “white box” algorithms for incremental learning even for sufficiently complex image data.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 2031899
- PAR ID:
- 10250389
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
- ISSN:
- 2332-564X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
The recent success of deep neural networks in prediction tasks on wearable sensor data is evident. However, in more practical online learning scenarios, where new data arrive sequentially, neural networks suffer severely from the ``catastrophic forgetting`` problem. In real-world settings, given a pre-trained model on the old data, when we collect new data, it is practically infeasible to re-train the model on both old and new data because the computational costs will increase dramatically as more and more data arrive in time. However, if we fine-tune the model only with the new data because the new data might be different from the old data, the neural network parameters will change to fit the new data. As a result, the new parameters are no longer suitable for the old data. This phenomenon is known as catastrophic forgetting, and continual learning research aims to overcome this problem with minimal computational costs. While most of the continual learning research focuses on computer vision tasks, implications of catastrophic forgetting in wearable computing research and potential avenues to address this problem have remained unexplored. To address this knowledge gap, we study continual learning for activity recognition using wearable sensor data. We show that the catastrophic forgetting problem is a critical challenge for real-world deployment of machine learning models for wearables. Moreover, we show that the catastrophic forgetting problem can be alleviated by employing various training techniques.more » « less
-
Bush, Daniel (Ed.)Artificial neural networks overwrite previously learned tasks when trained sequentially, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting. In contrast, the brain learns continuously, and typically learns best when new training is interleaved with periods of sleep for memory consolidation. Here we used spiking network to study mechanisms behind catastrophic forgetting and the role of sleep in preventing it. The network could be trained to learn a complex foraging task but exhibited catastrophic forgetting when trained sequentially on different tasks. In synaptic weight space, new task training moved the synaptic weight configuration away from the manifold representing old task leading to forgetting. Interleaving new task training with periods of off-line reactivation, mimicking biological sleep, mitigated catastrophic forgetting by constraining the network synaptic weight state to the previously learned manifold, while allowing the weight configuration to converge towards the intersection of the manifolds representing old and new tasks. The study reveals a possible strategy of synaptic weights dynamics the brain applies during sleep to prevent forgetting and optimize learning.more » « less
-
Continual learning is a setting where machine learning models learn novel concepts from continuously shifting training data, while simultaneously avoiding degradation of knowledge on previously seen classes which may disappear from the training data for extended periods of time (a phenomenon known as the catastrophic forgetting problem). Current approaches for continual learning of a single expanding task (aka class-incremental continual learning) require extensive rehearsal of previously seen data to avoid this degradation of knowledge. Unfortunately, rehearsal comes at a cost to memory, and it may also violate data-privacy. Instead, we explore combining knowledge distillation and parameter regularization in new ways to achieve strong continual learning performance without rehearsal. Specifically, we take a deep dive into common continual learning techniques: prediction distillation, feature distillation, L2 parameter regularization, and EWC parameter regularization. We first disprove the common assumption that parameter regularization techniques fail for rehearsal-free continual learning of a single, expanding task. Next, we explore how to leverage knowledge from a pre-trained model in rehearsal-free continual learning and find that vanilla L2 parameter regularization outperforms EWC parameter regularization and feature distillation. Finally, we explore the recently popular ImageNet-R benchmark, and show that L2 parameter regularization implemented in self-attention blocks of a ViT transformer outperforms recent popular prompting for continual learning methods.more » « less
-
Abstract Task‐incremental learning (Task‐IL) aims to enable an intelligent agent to continuously accumulate knowledge from new learning tasks without catastrophically forgetting what it has learned in the past. It has drawn increasing attention in recent years, with many algorithms being proposed to mitigate neural network forgetting. However, none of the existing strategies is able to completely eliminate the issues. Moreover, explaining and fully understanding what knowledge and how it is being forgotten during the incremental learning process still remains under‐explored. In this paper, we propose KnowledgeDrift, a visual analytics framework, to interpret the network forgetting with three objectives: (1) to identify when the network fails to memorize the past knowledge, (2) to visualize what information has been forgotten, and (3) to diagnose how knowledge attained in the new model interferes with the one learned in the past. Our analytical framework first identifies the occurrence of forgetting by tracking the task performance under the incremental learning process and then provides in‐depth inspections of drifted information via various levels of data granularity. KnowledgeDrift allows analysts and model developers to enhance their understanding of network forgetting and compare the performance of different incremental learning algorithms. Three case studies are conducted in the paper to further provide insights and guidance for users to effectively diagnose catastrophic forgetting over time.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
