Do Pre-trained Models Benefit Equally in Continual Learning?

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Lee, Kuan-Ying, Zhong, Yuanyi, Wang, Yu-Xiong
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2022
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author Lee, Kuan-Ying
Zhong, Yuanyi
Wang, Yu-Xiong
author_facet Lee, Kuan-Ying
Zhong, Yuanyi
Wang, Yu-Xiong
contents Existing work on continual learning (CL) is primarily devoted to developing algorithms for models trained from scratch. Despite their encouraging performance on contrived benchmarks, these algorithms show dramatic performance drops in real-world scenarios. Therefore, this paper advocates the systematic introduction of pre-training to CL, which is a general recipe for transferring knowledge to downstream tasks but is substantially missing in the CL community. Our investigation reveals the multifaceted complexity of exploiting pre-trained models for CL, along three different axes, pre-trained models, CL algorithms, and CL scenarios. Perhaps most intriguingly, improvements in CL algorithms from pre-training are very inconsistent an underperforming algorithm could become competitive and even state-of-the-art when all algorithms start from a pre-trained model. This indicates that the current paradigm, where all CL methods are compared in from-scratch training, is not well reflective of the true CL objective and desired progress. In addition, we make several other important observations, including that CL algorithms that exert less regularization benefit more from a pre-trained model; and that a stronger pre-trained model such as CLIP does not guarantee a better improvement. Based on these findings, we introduce a simple yet effective baseline that employs minimum regularization and leverages the more beneficial pre-trained model, coupled with a two-stage training pipeline. We recommend including this strong baseline in the future development of CL algorithms, due to its demonstrated state-of-the-art performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2210_15701
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Do Pre-trained Models Benefit Equally in Continual Learning?
Lee, Kuan-Ying
Zhong, Yuanyi
Wang, Yu-Xiong
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Existing work on continual learning (CL) is primarily devoted to developing algorithms for models trained from scratch. Despite their encouraging performance on contrived benchmarks, these algorithms show dramatic performance drops in real-world scenarios. Therefore, this paper advocates the systematic introduction of pre-training to CL, which is a general recipe for transferring knowledge to downstream tasks but is substantially missing in the CL community. Our investigation reveals the multifaceted complexity of exploiting pre-trained models for CL, along three different axes, pre-trained models, CL algorithms, and CL scenarios. Perhaps most intriguingly, improvements in CL algorithms from pre-training are very inconsistent an underperforming algorithm could become competitive and even state-of-the-art when all algorithms start from a pre-trained model. This indicates that the current paradigm, where all CL methods are compared in from-scratch training, is not well reflective of the true CL objective and desired progress. In addition, we make several other important observations, including that CL algorithms that exert less regularization benefit more from a pre-trained model; and that a stronger pre-trained model such as CLIP does not guarantee a better improvement. Based on these findings, we introduce a simple yet effective baseline that employs minimum regularization and leverages the more beneficial pre-trained model, coupled with a two-stage training pipeline. We recommend including this strong baseline in the future development of CL algorithms, due to its demonstrated state-of-the-art performance.
title Do Pre-trained Models Benefit Equally in Continual Learning?
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.15701