Complementary Learning for Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting Using Experience Replay

Complementary Learning for Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting Using Experience Replay

Mohammad Rostami, Soheil Kolouri, Praveen K. Pilly

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 3339-3345. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/463

Despite huge success, deep networks are unable to learn effectively in sequential multitask learning settings as they forget the past learned tasks after learning new tasks. Inspired from complementary learning systems theory, we address this challenge by learning a generative model that couples the current task to the past learned tasks through a discriminative embedding space. We learn an abstract generative distribution in the embedding that allows generation of data points to represent past experience. We sample from this distribution and utilize experience replay to avoid forgetting and simultaneously accumulate new knowledge to the abstract distribution in order to couple the current task with past experience. We demonstrate theoretically and empirically that our framework learns a distribution in the embedding, which is shared across all tasks, and as a result tackles catastrophic forgetting.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Transfer, Adaptation, Multi-task Learning
Humans and AI: Cognitive Modeling
Machine Learning: Learning Generative Models