Generalized Variational Continual Learning

One strand of research has used probabilistic regularization for continual learning, with two of the main approaches in this vein being Online Elastic Weight Consolidation (Online EWC) and Variational Continual Learning (VCL). VCL employs variational inference, which in other settings has been improved empirically by applying likelihood-tempering. We show that applying this modification to VCL recovers Online EWC as a limiting case, allowing for interpolation between the two approaches. In order to mitigate the observed overpruning effect of VI, we take inspiration from a common multi-task architecture, neural networks with task-specific FiLM layers, and find that this addition leads to significant performance gains, specifically for variational methods. In the small-data regime, GVCL strongly outperforms existing baselines. In larger datasets, GVCL with FiLM layers outperforms or is competitive with existing baselines in terms of accuracy, whilst also providing significantly better calibration. Continual learning methods enable learning when a set of tasks changes over time. This topic is of practical interest as many real-world applications require models to be regularly updated as new data is collected or new tasks arise. Standard machine learning models and training procedures fail in these settings (French, 1999), so bespoke architectures and fitting procedures are required. This paper makes two main contributions to continual learning for neural networks. First, we develop a new regularization-based approach to continual learning. Regularization approaches adapt parameters to new tasks while keeping them close to settings that are appropriate for old tasks. Two popular approaches of this type are Variational Continual Learning (VCL) (Nguyen et al., 2018) and Online Elastic Weight Consolidation (Online EWC) (Kirkpatrick et al., 2017; Schwarz et al., 2018). The former is based on a variational approximation of a neural network's posterior distribution over weights, while the latter uses Laplace's approximation. In this paper, we propose Generalized Variational Continual Learning (GVCL) of which VCL and Online EWC are two special cases. Under this unified framework, we are able to combine the strengths of both approaches. GVCL is closely related to likelihood-tempered Variational Inference (VI), which has been found to improve performance in standard learning settings (Zhang et al., 2018; Osawa et al., 2019).