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Title: A Neural Dirichlet Process Mixture Model for Task-Free Continual Learning

Paper content:
Despite the growing interest in continual learning, most of its contemporary works have been studied in a rather restricted setting where tasks are clearly distinguishable, and task boundaries are known during training.
However, if our goal is to develop an algorithm that learns as humans do, this setting is far from realistic, and it is essential to develop a methodology that works in a task-free manner.
Meanwhile, among several branches of continual learning, expansion-based methods have the advantage of eliminating catastrophic forgetting by allocating new resources to learn new data.
In this work, we propose an expansion-based approach for task-free continual learning.
Our model, named Continual Neural Dirichlet Process Mixture (CN-DPM), consists of a set of neural network experts that are in charge of a subset of the data.
CN-DPM expands the number of experts in a principled way under the Bayesian nonparametric framework.
With extensive experiments, we show that our model successfully performs task-free continual learning for both discriminative and generative tasks such as image classification and image generation.
Humans consistently encounter new information throughout their lifetime.
The way the information is provided, however, is vastly different from that of conventional deep learning where each minibatch is iid-sampled from the whole dataset.
Data points adjacent in time can be highly correlated, and the overall distribution of the data can shift drastically as the training progresses.
Continual learning (CL) aims at imitating incredible human's ability to learn from a non-iid stream of data without catastrophically forgetting the previously learned knowledge.
Most CL approaches (Aljundi et al., 2018; 2017; Lopez-Paz & Ranzato, 2017; Kirkpatrick et al., 2017; Rusu et al., 2016; Shin et al., 2017; Yoon et al., 2018) assume that the data stream is explicitly divided into a sequence of tasks that are known at training time.
Since this assumption is far from realistic, task-free CL is more practical and demanding but has been largely understudied with only a few exceptions of (Aljundi et al., 2019a; b) .
In this general CL, not only is explicit task definition unavailable but also the data distribution gradually shifts without a clear task boundary.
Meanwhile, existing CL methods can be classified into three different categories (Parisi et al., 2019) : regularization, replay, and expansion methods.
Regularization and replay approaches address the catastrophic forgetting by regularizing the update of a specific set of weights or replaying the previously seen data, respectively.
On the other hand, the expansion methods are different from the two approaches in that it can expand the model architecture to accommodate new data instead of fixing it beforehand.
Therefore, the expansion methods can bypass catastrophic forgetting by preventing pre-existing components from being overwritten by the new information.
The critical limitation of prior expansion methods, however, is that the decisions of when to expand and which resource to use heavily rely on explicitly given task definition and heuristics.
In this work, our goal is to propose a novel expansion-based approach for task-free CL.
Inspired by the Mixture of Experts (MoE) (Jacobs et al., 1991) , our model consists of a set of experts, each of which is in charge of a subset of the data in a stream.
The model expansion (i.e., adding more experts) is governed by the Bayesian nonparametric framework, which determines the model complexity by the data, as opposed to the parametric methods that fix the model complexity before training.
We formulate the task-free CL as an online variational inference of Dirichlet process mixture models consisting of a set of neural experts; thus, we name our approach as the Continual Neural Dirichlet Process Mixture (CN-DPM) model.
We highlight the key contributions of this work as follows.
• We are one of the first to propose an expansion-based approach for task-free CL.
Hence, our model not only prevents catastrophic forgetting but also applies to the setting where no task definition and boundaries are given at both training and test time.
Our model named CN-DPM consists of a set of neural network experts, which are expanded in a principled way built upon the Bayesian nonparametrics that have not been adopted in general CL research.
• Our model can deal with both generative and discriminative tasks of CL.
With several benchmark experiments of CL literature on MNIST, SVHN, and CIFAR 10/100, we show that our model successfully performs multiple types of CL tasks, including image classification and generation.
2 BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK 2.1 CONTINUAL LEARNING Parisi et al. (2019) classify CL approaches into three branches: regularization (Kirkpatrick et al., 2017; Aljundi et al., 2018) , replay (Shin et al., 2017) and expansion (Aljundi et al., 2017; Rusu et al., 2016; Yoon et al., 2018) methods.
Regularization and replay approaches fix the model architecture before training and prevent catastrophic forgetting by regularizing the change of a specific set of weights or replaying previously learned data.
Hybrids of replay and regularization also exist, such as Gradient Episodic Memory (GEM) (Lopez-Paz & Ranzato, 2017; Chaudhry et al., 2019a) .
On the other hand, methods based on expansion add new network components to learn new data.
Conceptually, such direction has the following advantages compared to the first two:
(i) catastrophic forgetting can be eliminated since new information is not overwritten on pre-existing components and
(ii) the model capacity is determined adaptively depending on the data.
Task-Free Continual Learning.
All the works mentioned above heavily rely on explicit task definition.
However, in real-world scenarios, task definition is rarely given at training time.
Moreover, the data domain may gradually shift without any clear task boundary.
Despite its importance, taskfree CL has been largely understudied; to the best of our knowledge, there are only a few works (Aljundi et al., 2019a; b; Rao et al., 2019) , each of which is respectively based on regularization, replay, and a hybrid of replay and expansion.
Specifically, Aljundi et al. (2019a) extend MAS (Aljundi et al., 2018) by adding heuristics to determine when to update the importance weights with no task definition.
In their following work (Aljundi et al., 2019b) , they improve the memory management algorithm of GEM (Lopez-Paz & Ranzato, 2017) such that the memory elements are carefully selected to minimize catastrophic forgetting.
While focused on unsupervised learning, Rao et al. (2019) is a parallel work that shares several similarities with our method, e.g., model expansion and short-term memory.
However, due to their model architecture, expansion is not enough to stop catastrophic forgetting; consequently, generative replay plays a crucial role in Rao et al. (2019) .
As such, it can be categorized as a hybrid of replay and expansion.
More detailed comparison between our method and Rao et al. (2019) is deferred to Appendix M.
In this work, we formulated expansion-based task-free CL as learning of a Dirichlet process mixture model with neural experts.
We demonstrated that the proposed CN-DPM model achieves great performance in multiple task-free settings, better than the existing methods.
We believe there are several interesting research directions beyond this work:
(i) improving the accuracy of expert selection, which is the main bottleneck of our method, and
(ii) applying our method to different domains such as natural language processing and reinforcement learning.

assistant: text: We propose an expansion-based approach for task-free continual learning for the first time. Our model consists of a set of neural network experts and expands the number of experts under the Bayesian nonparametric principle.