2020/06/09 by Jeremias Knoblauch, Hisham Husain, Knoblauch, Jeremias +3 · 7 citations
Computer Science · #Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning #Multimodal Machine Learning Applications #Machine Learning and Data Classification
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2006.05188
Continual Learning (CL) algorithms incrementally learn a predictor or representation across multiple sequentially observed tasks. Designing CL algorithms that perform reliably and avoid so-called catastrophic forgetting has proven a persistent challenge. The current paper develops a theoretical approach that explains why. In particular, we derive the computational properties which CL algorithms would have to possess in order to avoid catastrophic forgetting. Our main finding is that such optimal CL algorithms generally solve an NP-hard problem and will require perfect memory to do so. The findings are of theoretical interest, but also explain the excellent performance of CL algorithms using experience replay, episodic memory and core sets relative to regularization-based approaches.