Continual Learning using the SHDL Framework with Skewed Replay Distributions

Amarjot Singh, Jay McClelland

Abstract: Human and animals continuously acquire, adapt as well as transfer knowledge throughout their lifespan. The ability to learn continuously is crucial for the effective functioning of agents interacting with the real world and processing continuous streams of information. Continuous learning has been a long-standing challenge for neural networks as the repeated acquisition of information from non-uniform data distributions generally lead to catastrophic forgetting or interference. This work proposes a modular architecture capable of continuous acquisition of tasks while averting catastrophic forgetting. Specifically, our contributions are: (i) Efficient Architecture: a modular architecture emulating the visual cortex that can learn meaningful representations with limited labelled examples, (ii) Knowledge Retention: retention of learned knowledge via limited replay of past experiences, (iii) Forward Transfer: efficient and relatively faster learning on new tasks, and (iv) Naturally Skewed Distributions: The learning in the above-mentioned claims is performed on non-uniform data distributions which better represent the natural statistics of our ongoing experience. Several experiments that substantiate the above-mentioned claims are demonstrated on the CIFAR-100 dataset.

Keywords: Continual Learning, Catastrophic Forgetting, SHDL, CIFAR-100