Incremental learning (IL) has received a lot of attention recently, however, the literature lacks a precise problem definition, proper evaluation settings, and metrics tailored specifically for the IL problem. One of the main objectives of this work is to fill these gaps so as to provide a common ground for better understanding of IL. The main challenge for an IL algorithm is to update the classifier whilst preserving existing knowledge. We observe that, in addition to forgetting, a known issue while preserving knowledge, IL also suffers from a problem we call intransigence, inability of a model to update its knowledge. We introduce two metrics to quantify forgetting and intransigence that allow us to understand, analyse, and gain better insights into the behaviour of IL algorithms. We present RWalk, a generalization of EWC++ (our efficient version of EWC [7]) and Path Integral [26] with a theoretically grounded KL-divergence based perspective. We provide a thorough analysis of various IL algorithms on MNIST and CIFAR-100 datasets. In these experiments, RWalk obtains superior results in terms of accuracy, and also provides a better trade-off between forgetting and intransigence.

While deep learning has led to remarkable advances across diverse applications, it struggles in domains where the data distribution changes over the course of learning. In stark contrast, biological neural networks continually adapt to changing domains, possibly by leveraging complex molecular machinery to solve many tasks simultaneously. In this study, we introduce intelligent synapses that bring some of this biological complexity into artificial neural networks. Each synapse accumulates task relevant information over time, and exploits this information to rapidly store new memories without forgetting old ones. We evaluate our approach on continual learning of classification tasks, and show that it dramatically reduces forgetting while maintaining computational efficiency.

We motivate Energy-Based Models (EBMs) as a promising model class for continual learning problems. Instead of tackling continual learning via the use of external memory, growing models, or regularization, EBMs change the underlying training objective to cause less interference with previously learned information. Our proposed version of EBMs for continual learning is simple, efficient, and outperforms baseline methods by a large margin on several benchmarks. Moreover, our proposed contrastive divergence-based training objective can be combined with other continual learning methods, resulting in substantial boosts in their performance. We further show that EBMs are adaptable to a more general continual learning setting where the data distribution changes without the notion of explicitly delineated tasks. These observations point towards EBMs as a useful building block for future continual learning methods.

已知生物制剂在他们的生活过程中学习许多不同的任务，并且能够重新审视以前的任务和行为，而没有表现不损失。相比之下，人工代理容易出于“灾难性遗忘”，在以前任务上的性能随着所获取的新的任务而恶化。最近使用该方法通过鼓励参数保持接近以前任务的方法来解决此缺点。这可以通过（i）使用特定的参数正常数来完成，该参数正常数是在参数空间中映射合适的目的地，或（ii）通过将渐变投影到不会干扰先前任务的子空间来指导优化旅程。然而，这些方法通常在前馈和经常性神经网络中表现出子分子表现，并且经常性网络对支持生物持续学习的神经动力学研究感兴趣。在这项工作中，我们提出了自然的持续学习（NCL），一种统一重量正则化和预测梯度下降的新方法。 NCL使用贝叶斯重量正常化来鼓励在收敛的所有任务上进行良好的性能，并将其与梯度投影结合使用先前的精度，这可以防止在优化期间陷入灾难性遗忘。当应用于前馈和经常性网络中的连续学习问题时，我们的方法占据了标准重量正则化技术和投影的方法。最后，训练有素的网络演变了特定于任务特定的动态，这些动态被认为是学习的新任务，类似于生物电路中的实验结果。

预训练的代表是现代深度学习成功的关键要素之一。但是，现有的关于持续学习方法的作品主要集中在从头开始逐步学习学习模型。在本文中，我们探讨了一个替代框架，以逐步学习，我们不断从预训练的表示中微调模型。我们的方法利用了预训练的神经网络的线性化技术来进行简单有效的持续学习。我们表明，这使我们能够设计一个线性模型，其中将二次参数正则方法作为最佳持续学习策略，同时享受神经网络的高性能。我们还表明，所提出的算法使参数正则化方法适用于类新问题。此外，我们还提供了一个理论原因，为什么在接受跨凝结损失训练的神经网络上，现有的参数空间正则化算法（例如EWC表现不佳）。我们表明，提出的方法可以防止忘记，同时在图像分类任务上实现高连续的微调性能。为了证明我们的方法可以应用于一般的持续学习设置，我们评估了我们在数据收入，任务收入和课堂学习问题方面的方法。

In lifelong learning, the learner is presented with a sequence of tasks, incrementally building a data-driven prior which may be leveraged to speed up learning of a new task. In this work, we investigate the efficiency of current lifelong approaches, in terms of sample complexity, computational and memory cost. Towards this end, we first introduce a new and a more realistic evaluation protocol, whereby learners observe each example only once and hyper-parameter selection is done on a small and disjoint set of tasks, which is not used for the actual learning experience and evaluation. Second, we introduce a new metric measuring how quickly a learner acquires a new skill. Third, we propose an improved version of GEM (Lopez-Paz & Ranzato, 2017), dubbed Averaged GEM (A-GEM), which enjoys the same or even better performance as GEM, while being almost as computationally and memory efficient as EWC and other regularizationbased methods. Finally, we show that all algorithms including A-GEM can learn even more quickly if they are provided with task descriptors specifying the classification tasks under consideration. Our experiments on several standard lifelong learning benchmarks demonstrate that A-GEM has the best trade-off between accuracy and efficiency. 1

本文研究了在连续学习框架中使用分类网络的固定架构培训深度学习模型的优化算法的新设计。训练数据是非平稳的，非平稳性是由一系列不同的任务施加的。我们首先分析了一个仅在隔离的学习任务的深层模型，并在网络参数空间中识别一个区域，其中模型性能接近恢复的最佳。我们提供的经验证据表明该区域类似于沿收敛方向扩展的锥体。我们研究了融合后优化器轨迹的主要方向，并表明沿着一些顶级主要方向旅行可以迅速将参数带到锥体之外，但其余方向并非如此。我们认为，当参数被限制以保持在训练过程中迄今为止遇到的单个任务的相交中，可以缓解持续学习环境中的灾难性遗忘。基于此观察结果，我们介绍了我们的方向约束优化（DCO）方法，在每个任务中，我们引入一个线性自动编码器以近似其相应的顶部禁止主要方向。然后将它们以正规化术语的形式合并到损失函数中，以便在不忘记的情况下学习即将到来的任务。此外，为了随着任务数量的增加而控制内存的增长，我们提出了一种称为压缩DCO（DCO-comp）的算法的内存效率版本，该版本为存储所有自动编码器的固定大小分配了存储器。我们从经验上证明，与其他基于最新正规化的持续学习方法相比，我们的算法表现出色。

人类智慧的主食是以不断的方式获取知识的能力。在Stark对比度下，深网络忘记灾难性，而且为此原因，类增量连续学习促进方法的子字段逐步学习一系列任务，将顺序获得的知识混合成综合预测。这项工作旨在评估和克服我们以前提案黑暗体验重播（Der）的陷阱，这是一种简单有效的方法，将排练和知识蒸馏结合在一起。灵感来自于我们的思想不断重写过去的回忆和对未来的期望，我们赋予了我的能力，即我的能力来修改其重播记忆，以欢迎有关过去数据II的新信息II）为学习尚未公开的课程铺平了道路。我们表明，这些策略的应用导致了显着的改进;实际上，得到的方法 - 被称为扩展-DAR（X-DER） - 优于标准基准（如CiFar-100和MiniimAgeNet）的技术状态，并且这里引入了一个新颖的。为了更好地了解，我们进一步提供了广泛的消融研究，以证实并扩展了我们以前研究的结果（例如，在持续学习设置中知识蒸馏和漂流最小值的价值）。

Artificial neural networks thrive in solving the classification problem for a particular rigid task, acquiring knowledge through generalized learning behaviour from a distinct training phase. The resulting network resembles a static entity of knowledge, with endeavours to extend this knowledge without targeting the original task resulting in a catastrophic forgetting. Continual learning shifts this paradigm towards networks that can continually accumulate knowledge over different tasks without the need to retrain from scratch. We focus on task incremental classification, where tasks arrive sequentially and are delineated by clear boundaries. Our main contributions concern (1) a taxonomy and extensive overview of the state-of-the-art; (2) a novel framework to continually determine the stability-plasticity trade-off of the continual learner; (3) a comprehensive experimental comparison of 11 state-of-the-art continual learning methods and 4 baselines. We empirically scrutinize method strengths and weaknesses on three benchmarks, considering Tiny Imagenet and large-scale unbalanced iNaturalist and a sequence of recognition datasets. We study the influence of model capacity, weight decay and dropout regularization, and the order in which the tasks are presented, and qualitatively compare methods in terms of required memory, computation time and storage.

特征表示的相似性在与域适应有关的问题的成功中起着枢转作用。特征相似性包括边际分布的不变性以及给定所需响应$ Y $（例如，类标签）的条件分布的闭合性。不幸的是，传统方法始终学习此类功能，而无需完全考虑到$ Y $以$ y $以$ y $考虑到信息，这又可能导致条件分布的不匹配或歧视结构的歧视结构的混合。在这项工作中，我们介绍了最近提出的冯Neumann有条件分歧，以提高多个域的可转移。我们表明，这种新的分歧是可差异的，并且有资格容易地量化功能与$ y $之间的功能依赖性。给定多个源任务时，我们将这种分歧整合到捕获$ y $，并且设计新颖的学习目标，假设这些源任务同时或顺序观察。在这两种情况下，我们在新任务的较小概括误差方面获得了对最先进的方法的有利性能，以及在源任务上丢失的灾难性遗忘的较少（在顺序设置中）。

恶意软件（恶意软件）分类为持续学习（CL）制度提供了独特的挑战，这是由于每天收到的新样本的数量以及恶意软件的发展以利用新漏洞。在典型的一天中，防病毒供应商将获得数十万个独特的软件，包括恶意和良性，并且在恶意软件分类器的一生中，有超过十亿个样品很容易积累。鉴于问题的规模，使用持续学习技术的顺序培训可以在减少培训和存储开销方面提供可观的好处。但是，迄今为止，还没有对CL应用于恶意软件分类任务的探索。在本文中，我们研究了11种应用于三个恶意软件任务的CL技术，涵盖了常见的增量学习方案，包括任务，类和域增量学习（IL）。具体而言，使用两个现实的大规模恶意软件数据集，我们评估了CL方法在二进制恶意软件分类（domain-il）和多类恶意软件家庭分类（Task-IL和类IL）任务上的性能。令我们惊讶的是，在几乎所有情况下，持续的学习方法显着不足以使训练数据的幼稚关节重播 - 在某些情况下，将精度降低了70个百分点以上。与关节重播相比，有选择性重播20％的存储数据的一种简单方法可以实现更好的性能，占训练时间的50％。最后，我们讨论了CL技术表现出乎意料差的潜在原因，希望它激发进一步研究在恶意软件分类域中更有效的技术。

我们引入了一个新的培训范式，该范围对神经网络参数空间进行间隔约束以控制遗忘。当代持续学习（CL）方法从一系列数据流有效地培训神经网络，同时减少灾难性遗忘的负面影响，但它们不能提供任何确保的确保网络性能不会随着时间的流逝而无法控制地恶化。在这项工作中，我们展示了如何通过将模型的持续学习作为其参数空间的持续收缩来遗忘。为此，我们提出了Hypertrectangle训练，这是一种新的训练方法，其中每个任务都由参数空间中的超矩形表示，完全包含在先前任务的超矩形中。这种配方将NP-HARD CL问题降低到多项式时间，同时提供了完全防止遗忘的弹性。我们通过开发Intercontinet（间隔持续学习）算法来验证我们的主张，该算法利用间隔算术来有效地将参数区域建模为高矩形。通过实验结果，我们表明我们的方法在不连续的学习设置中表现良好，而无需存储以前的任务中的数据。

Despite significant advances, the performance of state-of-the-art continual learning approaches hinges on the unrealistic scenario of fully labeled data. In this paper, we tackle this challenge and propose an approach for continual semi-supervised learning -- a setting where not all the data samples are labeled. An underlying issue in this scenario is the model forgetting representations of unlabeled data and overfitting the labeled ones. We leverage the power of nearest-neighbor classifiers to non-linearly partition the feature space and learn a strong representation for the current task, as well as distill relevant information from previous tasks. We perform a thorough experimental evaluation and show that our method outperforms all the existing approaches by large margins, setting a strong state of the art on the continual semi-supervised learning paradigm. For example, on CIFAR100 we surpass several others even when using at least 30 times less supervision (0.8% vs. 25% of annotations).

增量任务学习（ITL）是一个持续学习的类别，试图培训单个网络以进行多个任务（一个接一个），其中每个任务的培训数据仅在培训该任务期间可用。当神经网络接受较新的任务培训时，往往会忘记旧任务。该特性通常被称为灾难性遗忘。为了解决此问题，ITL方法使用情节内存，参数正则化，掩盖和修剪或可扩展的网络结构。在本文中，我们提出了一个基于低级别分解的新的增量任务学习框架。特别是，我们表示每一层的网络权重作为几个等级1矩阵的线性组合。为了更新新任务的网络，我们学习一个排名1（或低级别）矩阵，并将其添加到每一层的权重。我们还引入了一个其他选择器向量，该向量将不同的权重分配给对先前任务的低级矩阵。我们表明，就准确性和遗忘而言，我们的方法的表现比当前的最新方法更好。与基于情节的内存和基于面具的方法相比，我们的方法还提供了更好的内存效率。我们的代码将在https://github.com/csiplab/task-increment-rank-update.git上找到。

我们研究了类新型小说类发现的新任务（class-incd），该任务是指在未标记的数据集中发现新型类别的问题，该问题通过利用已在包含脱节的标签数据集上训练的预训练的模型，该模型已受过培训但是相关类别。除了发现新颖的课程外，我们还旨在维护模型识别先前看到的基本类别的能力。受到基于彩排的增量学习方法的启发，在本文中，我们提出了一种新颖的方法，以防止通过共同利用基类功能原型和特征级知识蒸馏来忘记对基础类的过去信息。我们还提出了一种自我训练的聚类策略，该策略同时将新颖的类别簇簇，并为基础和新颖类培训共同分类器。这使得我们的方法能够在课堂内设置中运行。我们的实验以三个共同的基准进行，表明我们的方法显着优于最先进的方法。代码可从https://github.com/oatmealliu/class-incd获得

持续学习研究的主要重点领域是通过设计新算法对分布变化更强大的新算法来减轻神经网络中的“灾难性遗忘”问题。尽管持续学习文献的最新进展令人鼓舞，但我们对神经网络的特性有助于灾难性遗忘的理解仍然有限。为了解决这个问题，我们不关注持续的学习算法，而是在这项工作中专注于模型本身，并研究神经网络体系结构对灾难性遗忘的“宽度”的影响，并表明宽度在遗忘遗产方面具有出人意料的显着影响。为了解释这种效果，我们从各个角度研究网络的学习动力学，例如梯度正交性，稀疏性和懒惰的培训制度。我们提供了与不同架构和持续学习基准之间的经验结果一致的潜在解释。

We introduce a conceptually simple and scalable framework for continual learning domains where tasks are learned sequentially. Our method is constant in the number of parameters and is designed to preserve performance on previously encountered tasks while accelerating learning progress on subsequent problems. This is achieved by training a network with two components: A knowledge base, capable of solving previously encountered problems, which is connected to an active column that is employed to efficiently learn the current task. After learning a new task, the active column is distilled into the knowledge base, taking care to protect any previously acquired skills. This cycle of active learning (progression) followed by consolidation (compression) requires no architecture growth, no access to or storing of previous data or tasks, and no task-specific parameters. We demonstrate the progress & compress approach on sequential classification of handwritten alphabets as well as two reinforcement learning domains: Atari games and 3D maze navigation.

Continual Learning (CL) is a field dedicated to devise algorithms able to achieve lifelong learning. Overcoming the knowledge disruption of previously acquired concepts, a drawback affecting deep learning models and that goes by the name of catastrophic forgetting, is a hard challenge. Currently, deep learning methods can attain impressive results when the data modeled does not undergo a considerable distributional shift in subsequent learning sessions, but whenever we expose such systems to this incremental setting, performance drop very quickly. Overcoming this limitation is fundamental as it would allow us to build truly intelligent systems showing stability and plasticity. Secondly, it would allow us to overcome the onerous limitation of retraining these architectures from scratch with the new updated data. In this thesis, we tackle the problem from multiple directions. In a first study, we show that in rehearsal-based techniques (systems that use memory buffer), the quantity of data stored in the rehearsal buffer is a more important factor over the quality of the data. Secondly, we propose one of the early works of incremental learning on ViTs architectures, comparing functional, weight and attention regularization approaches and propose effective novel a novel asymmetric loss. At the end we conclude with a study on pretraining and how it affects the performance in Continual Learning, raising some questions about the effective progression of the field. We then conclude with some future directions and closing remarks.

Lack of performance when it comes to continual learning over non-stationary distributions of data remains a major challenge in scaling neural network learning to more human realistic settings. In this work we propose a new conceptualization of the continual learning problem in terms of a temporally symmetric trade-off between transfer and interference that can be optimized by enforcing gradient alignment across examples. We then propose a new algorithm, Meta-Experience Replay (MER), that directly exploits this view by combining experience replay with optimization based meta-learning. This method learns parameters that make interference based on future gradients less likely and transfer based on future gradients more likely. 1 We conduct experiments across continual lifelong supervised learning benchmarks and non-stationary reinforcement learning environments demonstrating that our approach consistently outperforms recently proposed baselines for continual learning. Our experiments show that the gap between the performance of MER and baseline algorithms grows both as the environment gets more non-stationary and as the fraction of the total experiences stored gets smaller.

现代深度学习需要大规模广泛标记的数据集进行培训。少量学习旨在通过有效地从少数标记的例子中学习来缓解这个问题。在先前提出的少量视觉分类器中，假设对分类器决定的特征歧管具有不相关的特征尺寸和均匀特征方差。在这项工作中，我们专注于通过提出以低标签制度运行的差异敏感的模型来解决这一假设引起的限制。第一种方法简单的CNAP，采用基于分层正规的Mahalanobis距离基于距离的分类器，与现有神经自适应特征提取器的状态相结合，以在元数据集，迷你成像和分层图像基准基准上实现强大性能。我们进一步将这种方法扩展到转换学习设置，提出转导压盖。这种转换方法将软k-means参数细化过程与两步任务编码器相结合，以实现使用未标记数据的改进的测试时间分类精度。转导CNAP在元数据集上实现了最先进的性能。最后，我们探讨了我们的方法（简单和转换）的使用“开箱即用”持续和积极的学习。大规模基准的广泛实验表明了这一点的鲁棒性和多功能性，相对说话，简单的模型。所有培训的模型检查点和相应的源代码都已公开可用。