Lifelong Learning with Weighted Majority Votes

Pentina, Anastasia, Urner, Ruth

Neural Information Processing Systems 

Better understanding of the potential benefits of information transfer and representation learning is an important step towards the goal of building intelligent systems that are able to persist in the world and learn over time. In this work, we consider a setting where the learner encounters a stream of tasks but is able to retain only limited information from each encountered task, such as a learned predictor. In contrast to most previous works analyzing this scenario, we do not make any distributional assumptions on the task generating process. Instead, we formulate a complexity measure that captures the diversity of the observed tasks. We provide a lifelong learning algorithm with error guarantees for every observed task (rather than on average).