Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Akgül, Abdullah, Unal, Gozde, Kandemir, Melih
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.00936
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866909196343050240
author Akgül, Abdullah
Unal, Gozde
Kandemir, Melih
author_facet Akgül, Abdullah
Unal, Gozde
Kandemir, Melih
contents We study the problem of fitting a model to a dynamical environment when new modes of behavior emerge sequentially. The learning model is aware when a new mode appears, but it cannot access the true modes of individual training sequences. The state-of-the-art continual learning approaches cannot handle this setup, because parameter transfer suffers from catastrophic interference and episodic memory design requires the knowledge of the ground-truth modes of sequences. We devise a novel continual learning method that overcomes both limitations by maintaining a \textit{descriptor} of the mode of an encountered sequence in a neural episodic memory. We employ a Dirichlet Process prior on the attention weights of the memory to foster efficient storage of the mode descriptors. Our method performs continual learning by transferring knowledge across tasks by retrieving the descriptors of similar modes of past tasks to the mode of a current sequence and feeding this descriptor into its transition kernel as control input. We observe the continual learning performance of our method to compare favorably to the mainstream parameter transfer approach.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2203_00936
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Continual Learning of Multi-modal Dynamics with External Memory
Akgül, Abdullah
Unal, Gozde
Kandemir, Melih
Machine Learning
We study the problem of fitting a model to a dynamical environment when new modes of behavior emerge sequentially. The learning model is aware when a new mode appears, but it cannot access the true modes of individual training sequences. The state-of-the-art continual learning approaches cannot handle this setup, because parameter transfer suffers from catastrophic interference and episodic memory design requires the knowledge of the ground-truth modes of sequences. We devise a novel continual learning method that overcomes both limitations by maintaining a \textit{descriptor} of the mode of an encountered sequence in a neural episodic memory. We employ a Dirichlet Process prior on the attention weights of the memory to foster efficient storage of the mode descriptors. Our method performs continual learning by transferring knowledge across tasks by retrieving the descriptors of similar modes of past tasks to the mode of a current sequence and feeding this descriptor into its transition kernel as control input. We observe the continual learning performance of our method to compare favorably to the mainstream parameter transfer approach.
title Continual Learning of Multi-modal Dynamics with External Memory
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.00936