用快慢适应机制提升模型持续学习能力,无需改架构。
Fast and Slow Variational Continual Learning

- 用历史后验合并实现慢适应,抑制知识漂移。
- 在大语言模型上优于现有优化器和正则化方法。
- 可无缝集成到IVON优化器,计算开销接近Adam。
持续学习仍是现代深度网络的重大挑战,部分原因在于常用优化器缺乏内在的持续适应机制。快速与慢速适应的平衡机制在神经科学和生物学中已有深厚基础,但如何将其融入常见优化器仍无共识。本文提出通过变分持续学习(VCL)框架,将历史后验作为未来先验,实现慢适应。核心思想是合并过往后验以减缓知识漂移,再将其作为先验用于VCL更新,实现快速权重调整。该方法可无缝嵌入IVON优化器,其形式与成本几乎与Adam相同。我们称此新优化器为持续性IVON(CoVON),实验表明它不仅持续优于现有VCL优化器,还在领域增量学习、持续预训练及大语言模型微调任务中表现更优。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Continual learning remains a major challenge for modern deep networks, partly because commonly used optimizers lack inherent mechanisms for continual adaptation. One such natural mechanism is fast and slow adaptation to balance stability and plasticity. This mechanism has deep roots in neuroscience and biology, but there is no consensus on how to best incorporate it in commonly used optimizers. Here, we show that this can be easily done via the VCL framework, where past posteriors are used as priors in the future. Our key idea is to incorporate slow adaptation via merging of past posteriors to slow down the drift in the knowledge as learning progresses. The merged posterior is then used as the prior in the VCL update to implement the fast-weight updates. These steps can be seamlessly implemented in the IVON optimizer, whose form and costs are nearly identical to that of Adam. We call this new optimizer the Continual IVON (CoVON) optimizer and show that it not only consistently improves over existing VCL optimizers, but also performs better than other weight-regularization strategies across domain-incremental learning, continual pre-training, and fine-tuning of large language models.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。