La-MAML: Look-ahead Meta Learning for Continual Learning

Gunshi Gupta, Karmesh Yadav, Liam Paull

Student First Author: Yes

Keywords: Continual Learning, Meta Learning, Online Learning

Abstract: The continual learning problem involves training models with limited capacity to perform well on a set of an unknown number of sequentially arriving tasks. While meta-learning shows great potential for reducing interference between old and new tasks, the current training procedures tend to be either slow or offline, and sensitive to many hyper-parameters. In this work, we propose Look-ahead MAML (La-MAML), a fast optimisation-based meta-learning algorithm for online-continual learning, aided by a small episodic memory. By incorporating the modulation of per-parameter learning rates in our meta-learning update, our approach also allows us to draw connections to and exploit prior work on hypergradients and meta-descent. This provides a more flexible and efficient way to mitigate catastrophic forgetting compared to conventional prior-based methods. La-MAML achieves performance superior to other replay-based, prior-based and meta-learning based approaches for continual learning on real-world visual classification benchmarks.

TL;DR: This work develops a gradient-based meta-learning algorithm for efficient, online continual learning, that is robust and scalable to real-world visual benchmarks.

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2007.13904/code)