Revisiting Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learning

Zhiyi Chen, Tong Lin*

Abstract: Gradient Episodic Memory (GEM) is an effective model for continual learning, where each gradient update for the current task is formulated as a quadratic program problem with inequality constraints that alleviate catastrophic forgetting of previous tasks. However, practical use of GEM is impeded by several limitations: (1) the data examples stored in the episodic memory may not be representative of past tasks; (2) the inequality constraints appear to be rather restrictive for competing or conflicting tasks; (3) the inequality constraints can only avoid catastrophic forgetting but can not assure positive backward transfer. To address these issues, in this paper we aim at improving the original GEM model via three handy techniques without extra computational cost. Experiments on MNIST Permutations and incremental CIFAR100 datasets demonstrate that our techniques enhance the performance of GEM remarkably. On CIFAR100 the average accuracy is improved from 66.48% to 68.76%, along with the backward (knowledge) transfer growing from 1.38% to 4.03%.

Code: https://github.com/yu-long-bian-hua/2020iclr