In plain words: Instead of hand-designing rules that stop a network forgetting old tasks, this trains the network to invent its own learning algorithm, scored on new and old tasks. On a split image benchmark with no saved old data, it beat hand-made rules and popular alternatives.
Abstract · Metalearning Continual Learning Algorithms
General-purpose learning systems should improve themselves in open-ended fashion in ever-changing environments. Conventional learning algorithms for neural networks, however, suffer from catastrophic forgetting (CF), i.e., previously acquired skills are forgotten when a new task is learned. Instead of hand-crafting new algorithms for avoiding CF, we propose Automated Continual Learning (ACL) to train self-referential neural networks to metalearn their own in-context continual (meta)learning algorithms. ACL encodes continual learning (CL) desiderata -- good performance on both old and new tasks -- into its metalearning objectives. Our experiments demonstrate that ACL effectively resolves "in-context catastrophic forgetting," a problem that naive in-context learning algorithms suffer from; ACL-learned algorithms outperform both hand-crafted learning algorithms and popular meta-continual learning methods on the Split-MNIST benchmark in the replay-free setting, and enables continual learning of diverse tasks consisting of multiple standard image classification datasets. We also discuss the current limitations of in-context CL by comparing ACL with state-of-the-art CL methods that leverage pre-trained models. Overall, we bring several novel perspectives into the long-standing problem of CL.
Kazuki Irie, Róbert Csordás, Jürgen Schmidhuber
arXiv:2312.00276 · cs.LG · submitted Dec 1, 2023 · updated Feb 17, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to TMLR 02/2025. An earlier version of this work titled "Automating Continual Learning" was made available online in 2023