Neural Architecture for Online Ensemble Continual Learning

Mateusz Andrzej Wójcik, Witold Kościukiewicz, Adam Gonczarek, Tomasz Jan Kajdanowicz

Keywords: continual learning, meta learning, ensemble, neural networks

TL;DR: We propose a neural architecture for online ensemble continual learning. We showed significantly improved accuracy and reduced forgetting over the reference methods.

Abstract: Continual learning with an increasing number of classes is a challenging task. The difficulty rises when each example is presented exactly once, which requires the model to learn online. Recent methods with classic parameter optimization procedures have been shown to struggle in such setups or have limitations like non-differentiable components or memory buffers. For this reason, we present the fully differentiable ensemble method that allows us to efficiently train an ensemble of neural networks in the end-to-end regime. The proposed technique achieves SOTA results without a memory buffer and clearly outperforms the reference methods. The conducted experiments have also shown a significant increase in the performance for small ensembles, which demonstrates the capability of obtaining relatively high classification accuracy with a reduced number of classifiers.

Community Implementations: [ 2 code implementations](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2211.14963/code)