Related papers: The Effect of Task Ordering in Continual Learning

The Effect of Task Ordering in Continual Learning

URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2205.13323v1
Date: Thu, 26 May 2022 12:56:15 GMT
Title: The Effect of Task Ordering in Continual Learning
Authors: Samuel J. Bell and Neil D. Lawrence
Abstract summary: We show that reordering tasks significantly affects the amount of catastrophic forgetting. We show that the effect of task ordering can be exploited to modify continual learning performance.
Score: 12.571389210876315
License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
Abstract: We investigate the effect of task ordering on continual learning performance. We conduct an extensive series of empirical experiments on synthetic and naturalistic datasets and show that reordering tasks significantly affects the amount of catastrophic forgetting. Connecting to the field of curriculum learning, we show that the effect of task ordering can be exploited to modify continual learning performance, and present a simple approach for doing so. Our method computes the distance between all pairs of tasks, where distance is defined as the source task curvature of a gradient step toward the target task. Using statistically rigorous methods and sound experimental design, we show that task ordering is an important aspect of continual learning that can be modified for improved performance.

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