Meta-learnt priors slow down catastrophic forgetting in neural networks
This addresses the problem of knowledge loss in AI systems when learning new tasks, though it is incremental as it builds on existing meta-learning techniques.
The paper tackles catastrophic forgetting in neural networks by using meta-learning to expose models to multiple tasks sequentially, resulting in improved performance on Omniglot and MiniImageNet classification tasks.
Current training regimes for deep learning usually involve exposure to a single task / dataset at a time. Here we start from the observation that in this context the trained model is not given any knowledge of anything outside its (single-task) training distribution, and has thus no way to learn parameters (i.e., feature detectors or policies) that could be helpful to solve other tasks, and to limit future interference with the acquired knowledge, and thus catastrophic forgetting. Here we show that catastrophic forgetting can be mitigated in a meta-learning context, by exposing a neural network to multiple tasks in a sequential manner during training. Finally, we present SeqFOMAML, a meta-learning algorithm that implements these principles, and we evaluate it on sequential learning problems composed by Omniglot and MiniImageNet classification tasks.