Bilevel Continual Learning

Ammar Shaker, Francesco Alesiani, Shujian Yu, Wenzhe Yin

Abstract: Continual Learning (CL) studies the problem of learning a sequence of tasks, one at a time, such that the learning of each new task does not lead to the deterioration in performance on the previously seen ones while exploiting previously learned features. This paper presents Bilevel Continual Learning (BiCL), a general framework for continual learning that fuses bilevel optimization and recent advances in meta-learning for deep neural networks. BiCL is able to train both deep discriminative and generative models under the conservative setting of the online continual learning. Experimental results show that BiCL provides competitive performance in terms of accuracy for the current task while reducing the effect of catastrophic forgetting.