STAR: Stability-Inducing Weight Perturbation for Continual Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Eskandar, Masih, Imtiaz, Tooba, Hill, Davin, Wang, Zifeng, Dy, Jennifer
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Eskandar, Masih
Imtiaz, Tooba
Hill, Davin
Wang, Zifeng
Dy, Jennifer
author_facet Eskandar, Masih
Imtiaz, Tooba
Hill, Davin
Wang, Zifeng
Dy, Jennifer
contents Humans can naturally learn new and varying tasks in a sequential manner. Continual learning is a class of learning algorithms that updates its learned model as it sees new data (on potentially new tasks) in a sequence. A key challenge in continual learning is that as the model is updated to learn new tasks, it becomes susceptible to catastrophic forgetting, where knowledge of previously learned tasks is lost. A popular approach to mitigate forgetting during continual learning is to maintain a small buffer of previously-seen samples and to replay them during training. However, this approach is limited by the small buffer size, and while forgetting is reduced, it is still present. In this paper, we propose a novel loss function, STAR, that exploits the worst-case parameter perturbation that reduces the KL-divergence of model predictions with that of its local parameter neighborhood to promote stability and alleviate forgetting. STAR can be combined with almost any existing rehearsal-based method as a plug-and-play component. We empirically show that STAR consistently improves the performance of existing methods by up to 15% across varying baselines and achieves superior or competitive accuracy to that of state-of-the-art methods aimed at improving rehearsal-based continual learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_01595
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle STAR: Stability-Inducing Weight Perturbation for Continual Learning
Eskandar, Masih
Imtiaz, Tooba
Hill, Davin
Wang, Zifeng
Dy, Jennifer
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Humans can naturally learn new and varying tasks in a sequential manner. Continual learning is a class of learning algorithms that updates its learned model as it sees new data (on potentially new tasks) in a sequence. A key challenge in continual learning is that as the model is updated to learn new tasks, it becomes susceptible to catastrophic forgetting, where knowledge of previously learned tasks is lost. A popular approach to mitigate forgetting during continual learning is to maintain a small buffer of previously-seen samples and to replay them during training. However, this approach is limited by the small buffer size, and while forgetting is reduced, it is still present. In this paper, we propose a novel loss function, STAR, that exploits the worst-case parameter perturbation that reduces the KL-divergence of model predictions with that of its local parameter neighborhood to promote stability and alleviate forgetting. STAR can be combined with almost any existing rehearsal-based method as a plug-and-play component. We empirically show that STAR consistently improves the performance of existing methods by up to 15% across varying baselines and achieves superior or competitive accuracy to that of state-of-the-art methods aimed at improving rehearsal-based continual learning.
title STAR: Stability-Inducing Weight Perturbation for Continual Learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01595