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Title: Task-agnostic Continual Learning via Growing Long-Term Memory Networks

Paper content:
As our experience shows, humans can learn and deploy a myriad of different skills to tackle the situations they encounter daily.
Neural networks, in contrast, have a fixed memory capacity that prevents them from learning more than a few sets of skills before starting to forget them.
In this work, we make a step to bridge neural networks with human-like learning capabilities.
For this, we propose a model with a growing and open-bounded memory capacity that can be accessed based on the model’s current demands.
To test this system, we introduce a continual learning task based on language modelling where the model is exposed to multiple languages and domains in sequence, without providing any explicit signal on the type of input it is currently dealing with.
The proposed system exhibits improved adaptation skills in that it can recover faster than comparable baselines after a switch in the input language or domain.
In a classic cartoon by Gary Larson, a student raises his hand to ask the teacher: "Mr. Osborne, may I be excused? My brain is full." (Larson & Martin, 2003) .
We laugh at this situation because we know it is absurd.
Human brains don't just get full.
Instead, they seem to be able to keep in their long-term memory massive amounts of information encoding well-acquired knowledge and skills.
Furthermore, the information stored in memory is not necessarily relevant at all times.
For instance, a person may have a phone call in French in the morning, then go about her daily errands in German, and later write an email in English.
Different linguistic knowledge will be required for each of these situations, and context alone, rather than some explicit signal, will dictate what is needed at each given moment.
Vanilla neural network models have been successfully deployed in various applications in the past.
However, they rely on fixed sized memories and suffer from the problem known as "catastrophic forgetting" (McCloskey & Cohen, 1989; Ratcliff, 1990) , which refers to the fact that previously acquired information is quickly forgotten as novel skills need to be mastered.
Earlier work attempted to correct this problem by looking for available capacity on a fixed-sized network that would allow encoding a new solution without affecting previously learned tasks (Kirkpatrick et al., 2017; Zenke et al., 2017; Serrà et al., 2018; Lopez-Paz & Ranzato, 2017; Fernando et al., 2017; Lee et al., 2017) .
The problem with this approach is that eventually, the system will run out of available capacity.
Instead, here we argue for developing models that can grow their internal capacity.
While some work has also relied on growing the model to face catastrophic forgetting (Rusu et al., 2016; Li & Hoiem, 2018; Aljundi et al., 2017) , they all rely, to the best of our knowledge, on an explicit signal identifying the task that the system is currently solving.
Indeed, most work dealing with catastrophic forgetting has evaluated the models on settings often making unrealistic assumptions.
Not only they typically provided the model with an explicit identifier for the task at hand, but also tasks featured unnatural properties, such as scrambled pixels, or categories that were incrementally added, but presented sequentially on blocks once and for all, and never encountered again during training.
Only recently, some work has started tackling continual learning in a more realistic task-agnostic way (Aljundi et al., 2019 ).
Yet, there are no standard publicly available datasets that can help the evaluation of continual learning systems on more natural settings.
In this paper, we make a two-fold contribution towards task agnostic continual learning.
First, we introduce a recurrent neural network that can grow its memory by creating new modules as training progresses.
Rather than using all modules simultaneously, or indexing them based on a task identification signal, our model learns to weight their contributions to adapt to the current context.
Second, we introduce to the community a multilingual/multidomain language modelling task with switching domains that we hope can fit this bill.
We propose two variants of it.
The first is a character-based language modelling benchmark with text written in 5 different languages that randomly switch between one another.
The second one is a word-based language modelling task, where the text oscillates between 4 different domains.
No segmentation signal is given when there is a switch, making the models having to discover it autonomously while they are evaluated for their adaptation skills.
Our experimental results show that our system can switch between different domains faster than comparable neural networks.
Furthermore, our model is very general because it does not make any assumption about the type of underlying neural network architecture and thus, it can easily be adopted for tackling other tasks in conjunction with any other neural network system.
We believe that developing more flexible forms of artificial intelligence will probably require flexible memory capabilities that can only be delivered by models capable of growth.
Here we have proposed a method based on growing full-fledged modules over time.
We explored a particular instantiation of this architecture in which modules are grown at a constant rate and consolidated into a long-term memory (LTM).
Once the model has reached a maximum size, memories can be still be consolidated into LTM by reinstating LTM modules back into STM (see Figure 1 ).
Furthermore, we introduced to the community two lifelong language modelling tasks.
One, characterbased and multilingual, and other, word-based on multiple domains.
Our experiments confirm the efficacy of our Growing LTM model, showing that it can learn to adapt much faster than comparable baselines without suffering in terms of its overall performance.
The proposed system is very flexible, allowing it to be used with any neural network architecture.
While here we have studied it in the lifelong language modeling setting, we believe that the system will also show promising results in other domains with similar requirements, such as robotics -where the model can learn to deal with different kinds of terrains-or image recognition -where it can learn different kinds of visual information depending on the contextual requirements (Rebuffi et al., 2017) .
In the future, mechanisms that exploit the structure of the input data for associating it with the relevant sets of models (Aljundi et al., 2017; Milan et al., 2016) can be explored.
Furthermore, we plan to study mechanisms that would allow the model to decide when to grow, rather than keeping a constant schedule.
In the long term, the model should be capable of deciding how to structure its long-term memory and whether or not to grow it, as Stack-RNNs do to grow the working memory.
Moreover, we are interested in exploring how communication between memories can be enabled through a central routing mechanism, in a similar fashion to the model proposed by Hafner et al. (2017) .
To conclude, in this work we have given a step -and we hope that more will follow-in providing neural networks with flexible memory structures.
We expect that further pursuing this goal will pave the way towards developing more general learning systems and, fundamentally, that in the future neural networks will no longer need to be excused from class just because their weights are full.

assistant: text: We introduce a continual learning setup based on language modelling where no explicit task segmentation signal is given and propose a neural network model with growing long term memory to tackle it.