动态调整网络结构,让模型持续学习不遗忘且保持灵活性。
Plasticity of Growing and Elastic Neural Networks in Online Continual Learning

- 通过逐步添加随机初始化单元,保持网络可塑性。
- 适应性生长网络在任务持续增加下仍保持高准确率。
- 弹性网络能同时压缩规模、提升效率,适合长期学习场景。
近年来,生长神经网络(growing neural networks)和弹性神经网络(elastic neural networks)在离线持续学习中被研究,重点解决灾难性遗忘问题。本文关注在线持续学习中另一关键挑战——可塑性丧失(plasticity loss),即网络学习能力随时间下降。受动物学习模式启发,并基于近期发现:随机初始化隐藏单元的增量引入有助于维持可塑性,本文研究了几种基础生长与弹性网络在在线持续学习中的表现。实验表明,自适应生长网络在持续增加死单元比例的情况下,仍能保持高预测准确率且不丧失可塑性;而自适应弹性网络在每个新任务开始时,不仅逐步添加新单元,还剪枝估计为死的隐藏单元,可在维持近似恒定紧凑规模的同时实现优异准确率。结果表明,具备结构自适应能力的生长与弹性网络,是在线持续学习中保持高可塑性的有前景方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Neural networks that can grow or both grow and shrink during learning, referred to as growing neural networks and elastic neural networks, respectively, have recently been explored in offline continual learning with a particular focus on catastrophic forgetting. Driven by the observations that 1) online continual learning closely resembles how animals learn; 2) loss of plasticity---the progressive decline in a learning network's ability to learn---is another crucial challenge facing continual learning; and 3) incremental introduction of randomly initialized hidden units was recently shown to help preserve plasticity, in this paper, we study the plasticity of several foundational growing and elastic networks in online continual learning. Our experiments in supervised learning settings show that adaptive growing networks, which incrementally incorporate new, randomly initialized units to the network while keeping all existing connections adaptive, can maintain high prediction accuracy without losing plasticity despite the continuous increase in the dead hidden unit proportion. Furthermore, we demonstrate that adaptive elastic networks, which in addition to progressively adding new hidden units also prune estimated dead hidden units at the beginning of each new task, can achieve excellent accuracy without loss of plasticity while simultaneously maintaining a near-constant, compact size. Our results suggest that growing and elastic networks, which exhibit the ability to adapt its structure to the relevant learning objectives, can be a promising class of algorithms also for preserving high plasticity in online continual learning.
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