Knowledge Engineering
Disentangling and mitigating the impact of task similarity for continual learning
Continual learning of partially similar tasks poses a challenge for artificial neural networks, as task similarity presents both an opportunity for knowledge transfer and a risk of interference and catastrophic forgetting.However, it remains unclear how task similarity in input features and readout patterns influences knowledge transfer and forgetting, as well as how they interact with common algorithms for continual learning.Here, we develop a linear teacher-student model with latent structure and show analytically that high input feature similarity coupled with low readout similarity is catastrophic for both knowledge transfer and retention. Conversely, the opposite scenario is relatively benign. Our analysis further reveals that task-dependent activity gating improves knowledge retention at the expense of transfer, while task-dependent plasticity gating does not affect either retention or transfer performance at the over-parameterized limit. In contrast, weight regularization based on the Fisher information metric significantly improves retention, regardless of task similarity, without compromising transfer performance. Nevertheless, its diagonal approximation and regularization in the Euclidean space are much less robust against task similarity. We demonstrate consistent results in a permuted MNIST task with latent variables. Overall, this work provides insights into when continual learning is difficult and how to mitigate it.
Supplementary Material: Knowledge-based in silico models and dataset for the comparative evaluation of mammography AI for a range of breast characteristics, lesion conspicuities and doses
M-SYNTH is organized into a directory structure that indicates the parameters. Code and dataset is released with the Creative Commons 1.0 Universal License We now review the timing required to perform mass insertion and imaging. In Table 2, we review the imaging time required for each breast density. The time varies from 2.84 GPU), we were able to generate the complete dataset in about two weeks.Breast Density Time (min) Fatty 13.463809 Scattered 11.002291 Hetero 3.655613 Dense 2.842028 Table 2: Timing analysis for imaging by breast density. Additional renderings of the breast phantoms generated for the study are shown in Figure 1, demonstrating a high level of detail and anatomical variability within and among models.
Overview of the 17th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management
IC3K 2025 (17th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management) received 163 paper submissions from 40 countries. To evaluate each submission, a double-blind paper review was performed by the Program Committee. After a stringent selection process, 31 papers were published and presented as full papers, i.e. completed work (12 pages/25' oral presentation), 81 papers were accepted as short papers (54 as oral presentation). The organizing committee included the IC3K Conference Chairs: Ricardo da Silva Torres, Artificial Intelligence Group, Wageningen University & Research, Netherlands and Jorge Bernardino, Polytechnic University of Coimbra, Portugal, and the IC3K 2025 Program Chairs: Le Gruenwald, University of Oklahoma, School of Computer Science, United States, Frans Coenen, University of Liverpool, United Kingdom, Jesualdo Tomรกs Fernรกndez-Breis, University of Murcia, Spain, Lars Nolle, Jade University of Applied Sciences, Germany, Elio Masciari, University of Napoli Federico II, Italy and David Aveiro, University of Madeira, NOVA-LINCS and ARDITI, Portugal. At the closing session, the conference acknowledged a few papers that were considered excellent in their class, presenting a "Best Paper Award", "Best Student Paper Award", and "Best Poster Award" for each of the co-located conferences.