In general, neural networks are not currently capable of learning tasks in a sequential fashion. When a novel, unrelated task is learnt by a neural network, it substantially forgets how to solve previously learnt tasks. One of the original solutions to this problem is pseudo-rehearsal, which involves learning the new task while rehearsing generated items representative of the previous task s. This is very effective for simple tasks. However, pseudo-rehearsal has not yet been successfully applied to very complex tasks because in these tasks it is difficult to generate representative items. We accomplish pseudo-rehearsal by using a Generative Adversarial Network to generate items so that our deep network can learn to sequentially classify the CIFAR-10, SVHN and MNIST datasets. After training on all tasks, our network loses only 1.67 absolute accuracy on CIFAR-10 and gains 0.24 absolute accuracy on SVHN. Our model's performance is a substantial improvement compared to the current state of the art solution.
A recent review of methods for overcoming CF concluded that current algorithms do not solve CF @cite_14 . They also found that EWC performed the best for learning multiple tasks and thus, we compare pseudo-recursal to EWC. The main contributions of our paper are; we show that pseudo-recursal can be used to overcome the CF problem in DNNs, sequentially learning CIFAR-10, SVHN and MNIST and we demonstrate that pseudo-rehearsal can be applied recursively to a separate classification and generative model. This architecture also satisfies the previously mentioned criteria. Although we limit ourselves to image classification in this paper, our techniques are applicable to other problems.
@cite_14
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We propose introspective convolutional networks (ICN) that emphasize the importance of having convolutional neural networks empowered with generative capabilities. We employ a reclassification-by-synthesis algorithm to perform training using a formulation stemmed from the Bayes theory. Our ICN tries to iteratively: (1) synthesize pseudo-negative samples; and (2) enhance itself by improving the classification. The single CNN classifier learned is at the same time generative --- being able to directly synthesize new samples within its own discriminative model. We conduct experiments on benchmark datasets including MNIST, CIFAR-10, and SVHN using state-of-the-art CNN architectures, and observe improved classification results.