修正EWC重要性评估缺陷,显著提升持续学习性能
Elastic Weight Consolidation Done Right for Continual Learning
- 通过反转logit值修复梯度消失与冗余保护问题
- 在多个任务上超越原版EWC及变体,性能明显提升
- 适合研究持续学习中权重正则化方法的学者
持续学习中的权重正则化方法通过评估并惩罚重要权重的变化来缓解灾难性遗忘。弹性权重固化(EWC)是该框架中的基础且广泛应用的方法,其基于梯度估计权重重要性。然而,其表现始终不理想。本文从梯度视角系统分析了EWC的重要性估计问题。首次发现,EWC依赖费舍尔信息矩阵(FIM)会导致特定情况下梯度消失和重要性估计不准。分析还揭示,EWC的变体记忆感知突触(MAS)对与先前任务无关的参数施加了不必要的约束,即冗余保护。这导致两者在重要性估计上存在根本性偏差,从而影响性能。为此,我们提出日志反转(LR)操作,一种简单有效的改进方法,通过在计算FIM时反转logit值,有效防止梯度消失与冗余保护。大量实验表明,该方法在多种持续学习任务和数据集上显著优于现有EWC及其变体,因此称为EWC Done Right(EWC-DR)。代码已公开于https://github.com/scarlet0703/EWC-DR。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Weight regularization methods in continual learning (CL) alleviate catastrophic forgetting by assessing and penalizing changes to important model weights. Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) is a foundational and widely used approach within this framework that estimates weight importance based on gradients. However, it has consistently shown suboptimal performance. In this paper, we conduct a systematic analysis of importance estimation in EWC from a gradient-based perspective. For the first time, we find that EWC's reliance on the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) results in gradient vanishing and inaccurate importance estimation in certain scenarios. Our analysis also reveals that Memory Aware Synapses (MAS), a variant of EWC, imposes unnecessary constraints on parameters irrelevant to prior tasks, termed the redundant protection. Consequently, both EWC and its variants exhibit fundamental misalignments in estimating weight importance, leading to inferior performance. To tackle these issues, we propose the Logits Reversal (LR) operation, a simple yet effective modification that rectifies EWC's importance estimation. Specifically, reversing the logit values during the calculation of FIM can effectively prevent both gradient vanishing and redundant protection. Extensive experiments across various CL tasks and datasets show that the proposed method significantly outperforms existing EWC and its variants. Therefore, we refer to it as EWC Done Right (EWC-DR). Code is available at https://github.com/scarlet0703/EWC-DR.
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