Title: SIDE-TUNING: NETWORK ADAPTATION VIA ADDI-TIVE SIDE NETWORKS

Abstract: When training a neural network for a desired task, one may prefer to adapt a pretrained network rather than start with a randomly initialized one -due to lacking enough training data, performing lifelong learning where the system has to learn a new task while being previously trained for other tasks, or wishing to encode priors in the network via preset weights. The most commonly employed approaches for network adaptation are fine-tuning and using the pre-trained network as a fixed feature extractor, among others. In this paper we propose a straightforward alternative: Side-Tuning. Side-tuning adapts a pre-trained network by training a lightweight "side" network that is fused with the (unchanged) pre-trained network using a simple additive process. This simple method works as well as or better than existing solutions while it resolves some of the basic issues with fine-tuning, fixed features, and several other common baselines. In particular, side-tuning is less prone to overfitting when little training data is available, yields better results than using a fixed feature extractor, and doesn't suffer from catastrophic forgetting in lifelong learning. We demonstrate the performance of side-tuning under a diverse set of scenarios, including lifelong learning (iCIFAR, Taskonomy), reinforcement learning, imitation learning (visual navigation in Habitat), NLP question-answering (SQuAD v2), and singletask transfer learning (Taskonomy), with consistently promising results.

Fixed Features:

Fine-Tune

Side-Tune:

Figure 1 : The side-tuning framework vs the common alternatives fine-tuning and fixed features. Given a pre-trained network that should be adapted to a new task, fine-tuning re-trains the pretrained network's weights and fixed feature extraction trains a readout function with no re-training of the pre-trained weights. In contrast, Side-tuning adapts the pre-trained network by training a lightweight conditioned "side" network that is fused with the (unchanged) pre-trained network using a simple additive process.

1. INTRODUCTION:

The goal of side-tuning is to capitalize on a pretrained model to better learn one or more novel tasks. By design, side-tuning does so without degrading performance of the base model. The framework is straightforward: it assumes access to the frozen base model B : X → Y that maps inputs into some representation space that is shared between the base task and the current (target) task. This representation space is flexible and could either be a latent space (e.g. in R N ) or actual model predictions. Side-tuning then learns a side model S : X → Y, so that the representations for the target task are R(x) B(x) ⊕ S(x), 

Side-tuning:

Fixed features: No learnable parameters. Too rigid. Suffers from information loss.

Fine-tuning: Large number of learnable parameters. Suffers from overfitting.

Side-tuning: Small number of (strategically placed) learnable parameters.

Figure 2 : Advantages of side-tuning vs. alternatives. Fixed features cannot adapt to new information, while fine-tuning adapts too easily and forgets old information. Side-tuning is a simple method to address these limitations.

for some combining operation ⊕. We use a learned alpha-blending, a ⊕ b αa + (1 -α)b for this purpose (other options are discussed in Section 3.0.3).

Certain pre-set curricula of α reduce the side-tuning framework to: fine-tuning, feature extration, and stage-wise training (see Fig. 3, right) . Hence those can be viewed as special cases of the general side-tuning framework. Also, other curricula suggest (e.g.) a maximum a posteriori estimator that integrates the B(x) prior with the evidence from S(x).

Side-tuning is an example of an additive learning approach as it adds (strategically placed) parameters for each new task. Fixed feature extraction would be a simple example of an additive approach with zero new parameters. As a result, fixed features are don't adapt the base network over the lifetime of the agent. A number of existing approaches address this by learning new parameters (the number of which scales with the size of the base network) for each new task (e.g. Rusu et al., 2016) . Unlike these approaches, side-tuning places no constraints on the structure of the side network, allowing the parameters to be strategically allocated. In particular, side-tuning can use tiny networks when the base requires only minor updates. By adding fewer parameters per task, side-tuning can learn more tasks before the model grows large enough to require parameter consolidation.

These approaches stand in contrast to most existing methods for incremental learning, which do not increase the number of parameters over time and instead gradually fill up the capacity of a large base model. For example, fine-tuning updates all the parameters. A large body of constraint-based methods focus on how to regularize these updates in order to prevent inter-task interference (Cheung et al., 2019) . Side-tuning does not require such regularization since the additive structure means inter-task interference is not possible.

We compare side-tuning to alternative approaches on both the iCIFAR and Taskonomy datasets. iCIFAR consists of ten distinct 10-class image classification problems. Taskonomy covers multiple tasks of varied complexity from across computer vision (surface normal and depth estimation, edge detection, image 1000-way classification, etc.). On these datasets, side-tuning uses side networks that are much smaller than the base. Consequently, even without consolidation, side-tuning uses fewer learnable parameters than the alternative methods.

This remarkably simple approach deals with the key challenges of incremental learning. Namely, it does not suffer from either:

• Catastrophic forgetting: which is the tendency of a network to abruptly lose previously learned knowledge upon learning new information. We show this in Section 4.2.1.

• Rigidity: where networks become increasingly unable to adapt to new problems as they accrue constraints from previous problems. We explore this in Section 4.2.2.

Side-tuning avoids these problems while remaining highly performant, which we demonstrate in Section 4.2.3.

2. RELATED WORK:

Broadly speaking, network adaptation methods either overwrite existing knowledge (substitutive methods) or save it and add new parameters (additive learning). In incremental (lifelong) learning, substitutive methods like fine-tuning are at risk of forgetting early tasks. To prevent forgetting, existing methods add non-interference constraints that eventually slow down learning or they force tasks to be independent which prevents reusing knowledge. Side-tuning is an additive approach that performs well and scales well, and, by design, does not suffer from the aforementioned problems.

We show this experimentally on various tasks and datasets, including iCIFAR (Rebuffi et al., 2016b) , Habitat (Savva et al., 2019) , SQuAD v2 (Rajpurkar et al., 2018), and Taskonomy (Zamir et al., 2018) .

In the remainder of this section we overview sidetuning's connection to related fields.

Network Adaptation modifies an existing network to solve a single new task. The most common approach is to update some or all of the network weights (fine-tuning), possibly by adding constraints (Kirkpatrick et al., 2016) . Other approaches freeze the weights and modulate the output by learning additional task-specific parameters. An economical approach is to use off-the-shelf-features with one or more readout layers (Razavian et al., 2014) . Other approaches use custom connection schema (Rusu et al., 2016) . Mallya & Lazebnik (2018) 2018)) while making tasks independent ignores the possibility for useful transfer from relevant previous tasks.

Additive methods in general, and side-tuning in particular, have the advantage that they do not suffer from catastrophic forgetting and are capable of transfer. However, additive methods have not been much explored because it is assumed that they either have poor performance or scale poorly. We show that side-tuning has good performance and scaling, and demonstrate the additive advantages experimentally; using the iCIFAR and Taskonomy datasets.

Meta-learning seeks to create agents that rapidly adapt to new problems by first training on tasks sampled from a standing distribution of tasks. Side-tuning is fundamentally compatible with this formulation and with existing approaches (e.g. Finn et al., 2017) . Moreover, recent work suggests that these approaches work primarily by feature adaptation rather than rapid learning (Raghu et al., 2019) , and feature adaptation is also the motivation for our method.

Residual Learning exploits the fact that it is sometimes easier to approximate a difference rather than the original function. This has been successfully used in ResNets (He et al., 2016) and robotics, where residual RL (Johannink et al., 2018; Silver et al., 2018 ) learns a single task by first training a coarse policy (e.g. behavior cloning) and then training a residual network on top (using RL).

Additive Learning in Other Literature. Concepts similar to additive learning have been studied in a number of fields. For instance, developing infants are hypothesized to learn separate, discontinuous, and context-dependent perception systems during development (Adolph et al., 2011; Kretch & Adolph, 2013) . Adults are able to rapidly learn new affordances, but only when those are minor updates to familiar, well-practiced systems (Cole et al., 2013) . On a more fine-grained scale, there are areas of functional specificity within the brain (Kanwisher, 2010) , including wholly separate pathways where output is mutually conditioned on one another (Schenk & McIntosh, 2010) .

3. THE SIDE-TUNING FRAMEWORK:

Side-tuning learns a side model S(X) and combines this with a base model B(x) so that the representations for the target task are computed as R(x) B(x) ⊕ S(x).

3.0.1. BASE MODEL B(x):

The base model B(x) provides some core cognition or perception, and we put no restrictions on how B(x) is computed. We never update B(x), and in our approach it has zero learnable parameters.

In general B(x) could be nonparametric, and it might not be optimized for any particular task. We consider several choices for B(x) in Section 4.4, but the simplest choice is just a pretrained network. (iii) Shows the connectivity structure when using side-tuning along with alphablending. (iv) Existing adaptation methods turn out to be special cases of side-tuning. In particular: fine-tuning, feature extraction, and other approaches are side-tuning with a fixed curriculum on the blending parameter α.

3.0.2. SIDE MODEL S(x):

Unlike the base model, the side network S(x) is updated during training; learning a residual that we apply on top of the base encoding. Iteratively learning residuals for a single task is known as gradient boosting (see Section 4.4 for a comparison). Side-tuning is instead focused on learning multiple tasks.

One crucial component of the framework is that the complexity of the side network can scale to the difficulty of the problem at hand. When the base is relevant and requires only a minor update, a very small network can suffice. Section 4.4 explores the effect of network size, how that changes with the choice of base and target tasks.

While the side network can be initialized using a variety of methods, we initialize the side network with a copy of the base network. When the forms of the base and side networks differ, we initialize the side network with weights distilled from the base network using knowledge distillation (Hinton et al., 2015) . We test alternatives in Section 4.4.

3.0.3. COMBINING BASE AND SIDE REPRESENTATIONS:

The final side-tuning representation is a combination, B(x) ⊕ S(x). What should ⊕ be?

Side-tuning admits several options for this combination operator. Choosing max yields the subsumption architecture. Concatenation and summation are other viable choices. We observe that alpha blending, a ⊕ b αa + (1 -α)b, works well in practice. Alpha blending preserves the dimensions of the inputs and is simpler than concatenation. In fact, concatenation followed by a channel-collapsing operation (e.g. 1x1 convolution) is a strict generalization of alpha-blending.

While simple, alpha blending is expressive enough that it encompasses several common transfer learning approaches. As shown in Figure 3 and when the side network is the same as the base, sidetuning is equivalent to feature extraction when α = 1. When α = 0, side-tuning is instead equivalent to fine-tuning. If we allow α to vary during training (which we generally do), then switching α from 1 to 0 is equivalent to the common (stage-wise) training curriculum in RL where a policy is trained on top of some fixed features that are unlocked partway through training.

Another notable curriculum is α(N ) = k k+N for k > 0 (hyperbolic decay). In this curriculum, α controls the weighting of the prior (B(x)) with the learned estimate (S(x)), and the weight of the evidence scales with the amount of data. This curriculum is suggestive of a maximum a posteriori estimate and, like the MAP estimate, it converges to the MLE (fine-tuning, α = 0).

Finally, α can treated as a learnable free parameter that determines how heavily to weight the base model. In practice, the value of α correlates with task relevance (see Section 4.4).

ASYMPTOTIC CONSISTENCY AND BIAS/VARIANCE:

When minimizing estimation error there is often a tradeoff between the bias and variance contributions (Geman et al., 1992) . Choosing between feature extraction or fine-tuning exemplifies this dilemma. Feature extraction (α = 0) locks the weights and corresponds to a point-mass prior that, unless the weights are already optimal, yields a very biased estimator. In fact, the estimator allows no adaptation to new evidence and is asymptotically inconsistent. On the other hand, fine-tuning (α = 1), is an uninformative prior yielding a low-bias high-variance estimator. With enough data, fine-tuning can produce better estimates, but this usually takes more data than feature extraction. Side-tuning addresses both the these problems. It reduces variance by including the fixed features in the representation, and it is consistent because it allows updating via the residual side network.

3.1. PERCEPTUAL REGULARIZATION AND CATASTROPHIC FORGETTING:

While α provides a way to control the importance of the prior, another natural approach for enforcing a prior is to penalize deviations from the original feature representation. Typically, it is easier to specify meaningful explicit priors on outputs (e.g. L2 for pixels) than on the latent representations, which can be difficult if not impossible to interpret. As long as the decoder D : Y → A is differentiable, any distance measure on the outputs can be pulled back through the decoder and into the latent space. This induced distance d D on the latent representations is called the pullback metric in differential geometry, and in deep learning it is called the perceptual loss (Johnson et al., 2016) . This may be a useful method for knowledge transfer when (i) the previous task is relevant to the new task and (ii) there is limited training data. A recent successful application of this approach would be the auxiliary losses in GPT (Radford et al., 2018) , though we did not find it effective.

Perceptual regularization is often used to dampen catastrophic forgetting. For example, Elastic Weight Consolidation uses a diagonalized second-order Taylor expansion of the expectation of the pullback metric. Learning Without Forgetting uses a decoder-based approach that can be interpreted as jointly updating both the base network and the pullback metric. We show that such regularization does not fully address the problem of catastrophic forgetting (Section 4.2.1). Side-tuning avoids catastrophic forgetting by design (as the base network is never updated).

3.2. SIDETUNING FOR CONTINUAL LEARNING:

Network adaptability is the sole criterion only if we care we solely about raw performance on a single target task. In reality we often care about the performance on both the current and previous tasks. This is the case for incremental learning, where we want an agent that can learn a sequence of tasks T 1 , ..., T m and, at the end, is capable of reasonable performance across the entire set. Thus, catastrophic forgetting becomes a major issue. In our experiments we dedicate one new side network to each new task and train it independently of the earlier side networks. In principle, learning of new tasks can benefit from all the side networks learned in previous tasks (i.e. the nth task can use all n -1 previous tasks). Since we do not make use of this available information, our results should be considered as a lower bound on side-tuning performance. We show that this simple approach provides a strong baseline for incremental learning-outperforming existing approaches in the literature while using fewer parameters on more tasks (in Section 4.2).

Side-tuning takes an additive learning approach to incremental learning, which means that alreadylearned components are never updated and performance across the whole set can only increase as the agent sees more tasks. This monotonicity is the key property of the additive family of algorithms. It is worth repeating that there is No Catastrophic Forgetting in Additive Learning and a typical learning curve for one of the tasks is shown in Figure 4 . Furthermore, because our implementation of side-tuning treats problems independently of their order in the sequence (always using the fixed base and one side network), side-tuning incurs no rigidity during training. We show this in Section 4.2.2.

Side-tuning naturally handles other continuous learning scenarios besides incremental learning. A related problem is that of continuous adaptation, where the agent needs to perform well (e.g. minimizing regret) on a stream of tasks with undefined boundaries and where there might very little data per task and no task repeats. As we show in Section 4.2, inflexibility becomes a serious problem for constraint-based methods and task-specific performance declines after learning more than a handful of tasks. Moreover, continuous adaptation requires an online method as task boundaries must be detected and data cannot be replayed (e.g. to generate constraints for EWC). Predictions from side-tuning do not degrade, and the initial quality is better in later tasks (e.g. compare the table in surface normals). We provide additional comparisons (including for PSP) in the supplementary.

Side-tuning could be applied to continuous adaptation by keeping a small working memory of cheap side networks that constantly adapt the base network to the input task. These side networks are small, easy to train, and when one of the networks begins performing poorly (e.g. signaling a distribution shift) that network can simply be discarded. This is an online approach, and online adaptation with small cheap networks has found recent success in (e.g. Mullapudi et al. ( 2018)).

4. EXPERIMENTS:

In the first section we show that side-tuning compares favorably to existing incremental learning approaches on both iCIFAR and the more challenging Taskonomy dataset. We then extend to multiple domains (computer vision, RL, imitation learning, NLP) in the simplified (transfer learning) scenario for N = 2 tasks. Finally, we interpret side-tuning in a series of analysis experiments.

4.1. BASELINES:

We provide comparisons of side-tuning against the following methods:

Scratch: The network is given a good random initialization and then trained normally.

Feature extraction (features)::

The base network is used as-is and is not updated during training.

Fine-tuning: An umbrella term that encompasses a variety of techniques, we consider a more narrow definition where pretrained weights are used as initialization and then training proceeds as in scratch.

Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC).:

A constraint-based incremental learning approach from Kirkpatrick et al. (2016) . We use the formulation from which scales better-, giving an advantage to EWC since otherwise we could use a larger side-tune network and maintain parameter parity.

Parameter Superposition (PSP): A parameter-masking approach from Cheung et al. (2019) .

Progressive Neural Network (PNN): A network adaptation approach from Rusu et al. (2016) .

Independent: Each task uses a network trained independently for the target task. This method uses far more learnable parameters than all the alternatives (e.g. saving a separate ResNet-50 for each task) and achieves very strong performance. Due to the scaling, it is generally not considered an incremental learning method. Similarly, the performance remains consistent even on later tasks (as we go down), showing that side-tuning does not become rigid. Alternative methods clearly forget (e.g. PSP) and/or become rigid (e.g. EWC). In Taskonomy, PNN and Independent are hidden under Sidetune. In iCIFAR, Sidetune (A) merges base and side information with a multilayer perceptron (adapter).

4.2. INCREMENTAL LEARNING: NO CATASTROPHIC FORGETTING IN ADDITIVE LEARNING:

On both the Taskonomy dataset (Zamir et al., 2018) and incremental CIFAR (iCIFAR, Rebuffi et al., 2016a) , side-tuning outperforms existing incremental learning approaches while using fewer parameters1 . Moreover, the performance gap is larger on more challenging datasets.

Taskonomy includes labels for multiple computer vision tasks including 2D (e.g. edge detection), 3D (e.g. surface normal estimation), and semantic (e.g. object classification) tasks. We first selected the twelve tasks that make predictions from a single RGB image, and then created an incremental learning setup by selecting a random order in which to learn these tasks (starting with curvature). As images are 256x256 we use a ResNet-50 for the base network and a 5-layer convolutional network for the side-tuning side network. The number of learnable network parameters used across all tasks is 24.6M for EWC and PSP, and 11.0M for side-tuning2 .

iCIFAR. First, we pretrain the base network (ResNet-44) on CIFAR-10. Then the 10 subsequent tasks are formed by partitioning CIFAR-100 classes into 10 disjoint sets of 10-classes each. We train on each subtask for 20k steps before moving to the next one. Our state-of-the-art substitutive baselines (EWC and PSP) update the base network for each task (683K parameters), while sidetuning updates a four layer convolutional network per task (259K parameters after 10 tasks).

4.2.1. CATASTROPHIC FORGETTING:

As expected, there is no catastrophic forgetting in side-tuning. Figure 6 shows that the error for side-tuning does not increase after training (blue shaded region), while it increases sharply for the other methods on both Taskonomy and iCIFAR.

The difference is meaningful, and Figure 5 shows sample predictions from side-tuning vs. EWC for a few tasks during and after training. As is evident from the bottom rows, EWC exhibits catastrophic forgetting on all tasks (worse image quality as we move right). In contrast, side-tuning (top) shows no forgetting and the final predictions are significantly closer to the ground-truth (boxed red).

4.2.2. RIGIDITY:

Side-tuning learns later tasks as easily as the first, while constraint-based methods such as EWC stagnate. The predictions for later tasks such as surface normals (in Figure 5 ) are significantly better using side-tuning-even immediately after training and before any forgetting can occur. Side-tuning outperforms alternatives on both datasets, achieving a significantly better average rank on all tasks.

Figure 7 quantifies this slowdown. We measure rigidity as the log-ratio of the actual loss or the ith task over the loss when that task is instead trained first in the sequence. As expected, side-tuning experiences zero slowdown on both datasets. For EWC, the increasing constraints make learning new tasks increasingly difficult-and the log-ratio increases with the number of tasks (Taskonomy, left). It is too rigid (log-ratio > 0) even in iCIFAR, where the later tasks are similar to earlier ones.

4.2.3. FINAL PERFORMANCE:

Overall, side-tuning significantly outperforms the other methods while using fewer than half the number of trainable parameters of the other methods. When the other methods use smaller networks, their performance decreases further. On both iCIFAR and Taskonomy, side-tuning achieves the best average rank (1.12 of 4 on Taskonomy, while the next best is 2.33 (PSP)).

This is a direct result of the fact (shown above) that side-tuning does not suffer from catastrophic forgetting or rigidity. It is not due to the fact that the sidetuning structure is specially designed for these types of image tasks; it is not (we show in Sec. 4.3 that it performs well on other domains).

In fact, the much larger networks used in EWC and PSP should achieve better performance on any single task. For example, EWC produces sharper images early on in training, before it has had a chance to accumulate too many constraints (e.g. reshading in Fig. 5 ). But this factor was outweighed by side-tuning's immunity from the effects of catastrophic forgetting and creeping rigidity.

4.3. UNIVERSALITY OF SIDE-TUNING: ADDITIONAL DOMAINS:

In order to address the possibility that side-tuning is somehow domain-or task-specific, we provide results showing that it is well-behaved in other settings. As the concern with additive learning is mainly that it is too inflexible to learn new tasks, we compare with fine-tuning (which outperforms other lifelong learning tasks when forgetting is not an issue). For extremely limited amounts of data, feature extraction can outperform fine-tuning. We show that side-tuning generally performs as well as features or fine-tuning-whichever is better. Transfer learning in Taskonomy: We trained networks to perform one of three target tasks (object classification, surface normal estimation, and curvature estimation) on the Taskonomy dataset (Zamir et al., 2018) and varied the size of the training set N ∈ {100, 4 × 10 6 }. In each scenario, the base network was trained (from scratch) to predict one of the non-target tasks. The side network was a copy of the original base network. We experimented with a version of fine-tuning that updated both the base and side networks; the results were similar to standard fine-tuning3 . In all scenarios, side-tuning successfully matched the adaptiveness of fine-tuning, and significantly outperformed learning from scratch, as shown in Figure 4 .3. The additional structure of the frozen base did not constrain performance with large amounts of data (4M images), and side-tuning performed as well as (and sometimes slightly better than) fine-tuning.

Question-Answering in SQuAD v2: We also evaluated side-tuning on a question-answering task (SQuAD v2 (Rajpurkar et al., 2018) ) using a non-convolutional architecture. We use a pretrained BERT (Devlin et al., 2018) model for our base, and a second for the side network 3 . Unlike in the previous experiments, BERT uses attention and no convolutions. Still, side-tuning adapts to the new task just as well as fine-tuning, outperforming features and scratch (Figure 4 .3).

Imitation Learning for Navigation in Habitat::

We trained an agent to navigate to a target coordinate in the Habitat environment. The agent is provided with both RGB input image and also an occupancy map of previous locations. The map does not contain any information about the environment-just previous locations. In this section we use Behavior Cloning to train an agent to imitate experts following the shortest path on 49k trajectories in 72 buildings. The agents are evaluated in 14 held-out validation buildings. Depending on the what the base network was trained on, the source task might be useful (Curvature) or harmful (Denoising) for imitating the expert and this determines whether features or learning from scratch performs best. Figure 4 .3 shows that regardless of the which approach worked best, side-tuning consistently matched or beat it.

Reinforcement Learning for Navigation in Habitat Using a different learning algorithm (PPO) and using direct interaction instead of expert trajectories, we observe identical trends. We trained agents directly in Habitat (74 buildings) 3 . Figure 4 .3 shows performance in 16 held-out buildings after 10M frames of training. Side-tuning performs comparably to the max of competing approaches.

4.4. LEARNING MECHANICS IN SIDE-TUNING:

Task relevance predicts alpha α. In our experiments, we treat α as a learnable parameter and find that the relative values of α are predictive of emprical performance. In imitation learning (Fig. 4 .3), curvature (α = 0.557) outperformed denoising (α = 0.252). In Taskonomy, the α values from training on just 100 images predicted the actual transfer performance to normals in Zamir et al. ( 2018), (e.g. curvature (α = 0.56) outperformed object classification (α = 0.50)). For small datasets, usually α ≈ 0.5 and the relative order, rather than the actual value is important.

Benefits for intermediate amounts of data:

We showed in the previous section that side-tuning performs like the best of {features, fine-tuning, scratch} in domains with abundant or scant data. In order to test whether side-tuning could profitably synthesize the features with intermediate amounts of data, we evaluated each approach's ability to learn to navigate using 49, 490, 4900, or 49k expert trajectories and pretrained denoising features. Side-tuning was always the best-performing approach and, on intermediate amounts of data (e.g. 4.9k trajectories), outperformed the other techniques (side-tune 9.3 vs. fine-tune: 7.5, features: 6.7, scratch: 6.6), Figure 9b ).

Network size. Does network size matter? We find (i) If the target problem benefits from a large network (e.g. classification tasks), then performance is sensitive to side network size but not size of the base. (ii) The base network can usually be distilled to a smaller network and sidetuning will still offer advantages over alternatives. In the supplementary material we provide supporting experiments from Taskonomy using both high-and low-data settings (curvature → {obj. class, normals}, obj. class → normals), and in Habitat (RL using {curvature, denoise} → navigation).

Not Boosting. Since the side network learns a residual on top of the base network, we ask: what benefits we could glean by extending side-tuning to do boosting? Although network boosting this does improve performance on iCIFAR (Figure 9a ), if catastrophic forgetting is not a concern then the parameters would've been better used in a deeper network rather than many shallow networks.

Initialization. A good side network initialization can yield a minor boost in performance. We found that initializing from the base network slightly outperforms a low-energy initialization4 , which slightly outperforms Xavier initialization. However, we found that these differences were not statistically significant across tasks (H 0 : pretrained = xavier; p = 0.07, Wilcoxon signed-rank test). We suspect that initialization might be more important on harder problems. We test this by repeating the analysis without the simple texture-based tasks (2D keypoint + edge detection and autoencoding) and find the difference in initialization is now significant (p = 0.01).

More than just stable updates. In RL, fine-tuning often fails to improve performance. One common rationalization is that the early updates in RL are 'high variance'. The usual solution is to first train using fixed features and then unfreeze the weights at some point in training (via a hyperparameter to be set). We found that this stage-wise approach performs as well (but no better than) keeping the features fixed-and side-tuning performed as well as both while being simpler than stage-wise (Fig. 9c ). We tested the 'high-variance update' theory by fine-tuning with both gradient clipping and an optimizer designed to prevent such high-variance updates by adaptively warming up the learning rate (RAdam, Liu et al., 2019) . This provided no benefits over vanilla fine-tuning, suggesting that the benefits of side-tuning are not solely due to gradient stabilization early in training.

5. CONCLUSION:

We have introduced the side-tuning framework, a simple yet effective approach for additive learning.

Since it does not suffer from catastrophic forgetting or rigidity, it is naturally suited to incremental learning. The theoretical advantages are reflected in empirical results, and side-tuning outperforms existing approaches in challenging contexts and with state-of-the-art neural networks. We further demonstrated that the approach is effective in multiple domains and with various network types.

6. FUTURE WORK:

The naïve approach to incremental learning used in this paper made a number of design decisions. These decisions could be analyzed and subsequently relaxed. In particular:

Flexible parameterizations for side networks: Our incremental learning experiments used the same side network architecture for all subtasks. A method for automatically adapting the networks to the subtask at hand could make more efficient use of the computation and supervision.

Better forward transfer: Our experiments used only a single base and single side network. Leveraging the already previously trained side networks could yield better performance on later tasks.

Learning when to deploy side networks: Like most incremental learning setups, we assume that the tasks are presented in a sequence and that task identities are known. Using several active side networks in tandem would provide a natural way to detecting distribution shift.

Using side-tuning to measure task relevance: We noted that α tracked task relevance, but a more rigorous treatment of the interaction between the base network, side network, α and final performance could yield insight into how tasks relate to one another.

Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) Figure 14 : Effect of network size. Modifying the network size from standard (large basae/small side). Small bases generally have a small impact on performance. For hard tasks (e.g. classification), using a deeper side network can have a large positive effect. We test the effect of base model architecture on performance and find that the small five layer convolutional network does comparable to the ResNet-50 when using features.

A.3.2 VARIANCE IN GRADIENTS: RECTIFIED ADAM:

Rectified Adam is a method introduced to deal with destructive high variance updates at the beginning of training. We tried using this for RL but found no improvements (shown in Figure 15 ). We ablate over different quantities of expert trajectories. We observe that when data is scarce, features is a powerful choice whereas when data is plentiful, fine-tuning performs well. In both scenarios, side-tuning is able to perform as well as the stronger approach.

A.3.4 EXTREMELY FEW-SHOT LEARNING:

In domains with very few examples, we found that side-tuning is unable to match the performance of other methods. We evaluated our setup in vision transfer for 5 images from the same building, imitation learning given 5 expert trajectories. In all experiments we use the common Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm with Generalized Advan-tage Estimation. Due to the computational load of ren-dering perceptually realistic images in Gibson we are only able to use a single rollout worker and we therefore decorre-late our batches using experience replay and off-policy vari-ant of PPO. The formulation is similar to Actor-Critic with Experience Replay (ACER) in that full trajectories are sampled from the replay buffer and reweighted using the first-order approximation for importance sampling.

Methods:



Finetune:

During training, the agent receives a large one-time reward for reaching the goal, a positive reward proportional to Euclidean distance toward the goal and a small negative reward each timestep. The maximum episode length is 500 timesteps, and the target distance is between 1.4 and 15 meters from the start.

Due to this paradigms' compute and memory constraints, it would be difficult for us to use large architectures for this setting. Thus, our base encoding is a five layer convolutional network distilled from the trained ResNet-50. Our side network is also a five layer convoultional network. Finetuning is handled the same way -update all the weights in this setup. Feature extraction uses the five layer network to collect features.

A.4.4 EXPERIMENTAL SETUP FOR LEARNING MECHANICS (SEC. 4.4)

Low energy initialization In classical teacher student distillation, the student is trained to minimize the distance between its output and the teacher's output. In this setting, we minimize the distance between the teacher's output and the summation of the student's output and the teacher's output).

The output space may have a different geometry than that of the input space and this would allow us to work with A.5 ADDITIONAL ANALYSIS

A.5.1 ADDITIONAL EVALUATIONS ON LIFELONG LEARNING:

We provide alternative perspectives and additional insights for our lifelong learning tasks.

iCIFAR In Fig. 7 (right), we see that the average rank of side-tuning higher than that of PNN. We find that side-tuning can bridge this gap with a multilayer perceptron (adapter) to merge the base and side networks. This is a common practice in PNN. In Fig. 20 , we see with the adapter network, the two methods are very similar when measuring classification error. Taskonomy In Fig. 7 (right), we found that the ranking of our method is better than all other methods, including PNN. By altering the connections in the PNN, we found an alternate (PNN3) that has comparable performance to side-tuning. In 21, we show all the losses normalized by single task loss (independent) as presented in Maninis et al. (2019) . The quantitative performance of our method outperforms all other methods and matches closely with that of PNN. We qualitatively show in Figures 22, 23, 24 , that these methods are comparable in performance. A.5.2 FUSION TECHNIQUES An alternative perspective views these methods as various fusions between some base information and new side information. In this framework, side-tuning is a late-fusion approach whereas PNN is a distributed-fusion approach. In Fig. 25 , we compare various fusion methods in iCIFAR and find that late fusion performs better than early fusion and comparable to if not better than distributed fusion. We run this analysis in Taskonomy as well -while the loss values differ somewhat, we find that the qualitative results seen in Figures 26, 27, 28 are rather similar. Thus, we conclude that the methods do not vary much. Distributed and early fusion require knowledge about the structure of how the information is computed. This is something late fusion is agnostic to and it can consider each information column a black box -this is useful in the case that your base information is NOT a neural network, perhaps non-parametric. In Fig. A.5 .2, we show that side-tuning can effectively use ground truth curvature as a base for lifelong learning whereas all the methods we compare against cannot use this information. Specifically, we downsample the curvature image and stack it into the same dimensions as the side output. Side-tuning with ground truth curvature achieves a better rank on the Taskonomy dataset than all other methods and comparable performance. Figure 29 : Sidetuning can be used successfully even with black-box side information. When the base information comes from a black-box process for which we have no other information, sidetuning can still be used (and performance improves vis-a-vis not using the inputs, and vs using inputs generated from a neural network). Existing lifelong learning approaches have no standard way to make use of this type of information.

RGB GT Indep PNN2 ST PNN:



:

Full experimental details, including learning rate and architecture, are provided in the supplementary.

All numbers not counting readout parameters, which are common between all methods.

We defer remaining experimental details (learning rate, full architecture, etc.) to the the appendix. See provided code for full details.

Where the side network is trained so that it does not impact the output. Full details in the supplementary.

Figures and Tables:

Figure3: Mechanics of side-tuning. (i) Side-tuning takes some core network (B) and adapts it to a new task by (ii) adapting a side network. (iii) Shows the connectivity structure when using side-tuning along with alphablending. (iv) Existing adaptation methods turn out to be special cases of side-tuning. In particular: fine-tuning, feature extraction, and other approaches are side-tuning with a fixed curriculum on the blending parameter α.

Figure 4: Theoretical sidetuning learning curve.

Figure 5: Side-tuning does not forget in incremental learning. Qualitative results for incremental learning on Taskonomy with additive learning (side-tuning, top 3 rows) and constraint-based learning (EWC, bottom 3 rows). Each row contains results for one task and columns show how predictions change over the course of training. Predictions from EWC quickly degrade over time, showing that EWC still catastrophically forgets.Predictions from side-tuning do not degrade, and the initial quality is better in later tasks (e.g. compare the table in surface normals). We provide additional comparisons (including for PSP) in the supplementary.

Figure 6: Incremental Learning on Taskonomy and iCIFAR. The above curves show loss and error on incremental learning experiments for three tasks on Taskonomy (left) and iCIFAR dataset (right). The fact that side-tuning losses are flat after training (as we go right) shows that it does not forget previously learned tasks.Similarly, the performance remains consistent even on later tasks (as we go down), showing that side-tuning does not become rigid. Alternative methods clearly forget (e.g. PSP) and/or become rigid (e.g. EWC). In Taskonomy, PNN and Independent are hidden under Sidetune. In iCIFAR, Sidetune (A) merges base and side information with a multilayer perceptron (adapter).

Figure 8: Side-tuning comparisons in other domains. Sidetuning matched the adaptability of finetuning on large datasets, while performing as well or better than the best competing method in each domain: (a) In Taskonomy, performing either Normal Estimation or Object Classification using a base trained for Curvatures and either 100 or 4M images for transfer. Results using Obj. Cls. base are similar and provided in the appendix. (b) In SQuAD v2 question-answering, using BERT instead of a convolutional architecture. (c) In Habitat, learning to navigate by imitating expert navigation policies, using inputs based on either Curvature or Denoising. Finetuning does not perform as well in this domain. (d) Using RL (PPO) and direct interaction instead of supervised learning.

Figure 9: Analysis of learning mechanics. (a) Boosting: deeper network > many shallow learners. (b) Side-tuning outperformed alternatives on intermediate amounts of data. (c) Features/Side-tuning do more than reduce gradient variance.

Figure 11: More qualitative results for EWC. These images were randomly selected from the validation set. Left-hand column is input, rightmost-column is ground truth. Images from left to right show predictions as training progresses. Each block of 4 rows shows predictions on a different task (Reshading, 2D Edges. Surface Normals.)

Figure15: Reinforcement Learning) Side-tuning matches the performance of the best method when using denoising features as well.

Figure19: Additional Imitation Learning Data Study. We ablate over different quantities of expert trajectories. We observe that when data is scarce, features is a powerful choice whereas when data is plentiful, fine-tuning performs well. In both scenarios, side-tuning is able to perform as well as the stronger approach.

Figure 20: Average Accuracy in iCIFAR for All Methods. Note that the performance of Side-tune (A) is comparable to that of PNN. Side-tuning (A) using multilayer perceptron (adapter) similar to what PNN uses.

Figure 22: Qualitative results for Reshading. Both PNN methods and Sidetune have similar qualitative results.

Figure 25: Average Accuracy for various Fusion methods in iCIFAR. Late fusion (the setting side-tuning uses) is better than or comparable to other fusion methods.

Figure 26: Qualitative results for Reshading for various Fusion methods. Various fusion methods have comparable results.

instead modulate the output by applying learned weight masks. These approaches, like side-tuning, are examples of additive learning.Incremental learning has the objective of learning a sequence of tasks T 1 , ..., T m and, at the end of training, performing well on the entire set. The sequential presentation creates two problems for neural networks. The first is catastrophic forgetting and the second is learning speed, which should

Table content: <table/>

Rigidity and average rank on Taskonomy and iCiFAR. From left: Side-tuning always learns new tasks easily; EWC becomes increasingly unable to learn new tasks as training progresses. Center: The same trend holds on iCIFAR, and the average rigidity is zero for side-tuning (and almost zero for PSP). Right:

Table content: <table><tr><td/><td colspan="2">Avg. Rank (↓)</td></tr><tr><td>Method</td><td colspan="2">Taskonomy iCIFAR</td></tr><tr><td>Fine-tune</td><td>4.13</td><td>4.60</td></tr><tr><td>EWC (λ = 10 0 , 10 5 )</td><td>4.00</td><td>2.80</td></tr><tr><td>PSP</td><td>3.88</td><td>4.10</td></tr><tr><td>PNN</td><td>1.88</td><td>1.20</td></tr><tr><td>Side-tune</td><td>1.13</td><td>2.30</td></tr><tr><td>Figure 7:</td><td/><td/></tr></table>

Peer review (iclr2020):
This paper proposes to tackle many tasks including among others lifelong learning or transfer learning. To do so, they propose to perform at the feature level an alpha blending between a fixed pretrained representation and a learnable (possibly smaller) network. Such a design allows to avoid catastrophic forgetting by construction and represents a tweakable middle point between a feature extractor and a fully finetuneable network. I am strongly leaning towards rejection. This paper provides numerous experiments but this should not replace novelty or presenting as novel something already present several times in the literature. For example, the proposed method does not differ much from *Progressive Neural Networks* by Rusu et al. if you switch off their lateral connections. Furthermore, several network adaptations papers are missing from the references and also present themselves as tweakable middle points between feature extractor and a fully finetuneable network. Among others: *Universal representations: The missing link between faces, text, planktons, and cat breeds* by Bilen et al., *Incremental Learning Through Deep Adaptation* by Rosenfeld et al. or *Efficient parametrization of multi-domain deep neural networks* by Rebuffi et al. The latter also proposing an additive adaptation all along the network which preserve the original filters for the original task.