Overcoming the Stability Gap in Continual Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Harun, Md Yousuf, Kanan, Christopher
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Harun, Md Yousuf
Kanan, Christopher
author_facet Harun, Md Yousuf
Kanan, Christopher
contents Pre-trained deep neural networks (DNNs) are being widely deployed by industry for making business decisions and to serve users; however, a major problem is model decay, where the DNN's predictions become more erroneous over time, resulting in revenue loss or unhappy users. To mitigate model decay, DNNs are retrained from scratch using old and new data. This is computationally expensive, so retraining happens only once performance significantly decreases. Here, we study how continual learning (CL) could potentially overcome model decay in large pre-trained DNNs and greatly reduce computational costs for keeping DNNs up-to-date. We identify the "stability gap" as a major obstacle in our setting. The stability gap refers to a phenomenon where learning new data causes large drops in performance for past tasks before CL mitigation methods eventually compensate for this drop. We test two hypotheses to investigate the factors influencing the stability gap and identify a method that vastly reduces this gap. In large-scale experiments for both easy and hard CL distributions (e.g., class incremental learning), we demonstrate that our method reduces the stability gap and greatly increases computational efficiency. Our work aligns CL with the goals of the production setting, where CL is needed for many applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_01904
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Overcoming the Stability Gap in Continual Learning
Harun, Md Yousuf
Kanan, Christopher
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
Pre-trained deep neural networks (DNNs) are being widely deployed by industry for making business decisions and to serve users; however, a major problem is model decay, where the DNN's predictions become more erroneous over time, resulting in revenue loss or unhappy users. To mitigate model decay, DNNs are retrained from scratch using old and new data. This is computationally expensive, so retraining happens only once performance significantly decreases. Here, we study how continual learning (CL) could potentially overcome model decay in large pre-trained DNNs and greatly reduce computational costs for keeping DNNs up-to-date. We identify the "stability gap" as a major obstacle in our setting. The stability gap refers to a phenomenon where learning new data causes large drops in performance for past tasks before CL mitigation methods eventually compensate for this drop. We test two hypotheses to investigate the factors influencing the stability gap and identify a method that vastly reduces this gap. In large-scale experiments for both easy and hard CL distributions (e.g., class incremental learning), we demonstrate that our method reduces the stability gap and greatly increases computational efficiency. Our work aligns CL with the goals of the production setting, where CL is needed for many applications.
title Overcoming the Stability Gap in Continual Learning
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.01904