TinySubNets: An efficient and low capacity continual learning strategy
This addresses the challenge of enabling models to learn multiple tasks sequentially without forgetting, which is crucial for real-world AI applications, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing architectural strategies.
The paper tackles the problem of capacity saturation and inefficient weight usage in continual learning by proposing TinySubNets, which combines pruning, adaptive quantization, and weight sharing to achieve better accuracy and improved capacity exploitation compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Continual Learning (CL) is a highly relevant setting gaining traction in recent machine learning research. Among CL works, architectural and hybrid strategies are particularly effective due to their potential to adapt the model architecture as new tasks are presented. However, many existing solutions do not efficiently exploit model sparsity, and are prone to capacity saturation due to their inefficient use of available weights, which limits the number of learnable tasks. In this paper, we propose TinySubNets (TSN), a novel architectural CL strategy that addresses the issues through the unique combination of pruning with different sparsity levels, adaptive quantization, and weight sharing. Pruning identifies a subset of weights that preserve model performance, making less relevant weights available for future tasks. Adaptive quantization allows a single weight to be separated into multiple parts which can be assigned to different tasks. Weight sharing between tasks boosts the exploitation of capacity and task similarity, allowing for the identification of a better trade-off between model accuracy and capacity. These features allow TSN to efficiently leverage the available capacity, enhance knowledge transfer, and reduce computational resource consumption. Experimental results involving common benchmark CL datasets and scenarios show that our proposed strategy achieves better results in terms of accuracy than existing state-of-the-art CL strategies. Moreover, our strategy is shown to provide a significantly improved model capacity exploitation. Code released at: https://github.com/lifelonglab/tinysubnets.