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Title: Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting via Hessian-free Curvature Estimates

Paper content:
Learning neural networks with gradient descent over a long sequence of tasks is problematic as their fine-tuning to new tasks overwrites the network weights that are important for previous tasks.
This leads to a poor performance on old tasks – a phenomenon framed as catastrophic forgetting.
While early approaches use task rehearsal and growing networks that both limit the scalability of the task sequence orthogonal approaches build on regularization.
Based on the Fisher information matrix (FIM) changes to parameters that are relevant to old tasks are penalized, which forces the task to be mapped into the available remaining capacity of the network.
This requires to calculate the Hessian around a mode, which makes learning tractable.
In this paper, we introduce Hessian-free curvature estimates as an alternative method to actually calculating the Hessian.
In contrast to previous work, we exploit the fact that most regions in the loss surface are flat and hence only calculate a Hessian-vector-product around the surface that is relevant for the current task.
Our experiments show that on a variety of well-known task sequences we either significantly outperform or are en par with previous work.
The main goal of machine learning is the ability to generalize from the given training data to unseen examples.
However, in practice the achievable degree of generalization is limited.
While in the ideal case an end-to-end system learns complex functions from minimum input, it is often necessary to introduce a certain amount of prior knowledge.
Such prior knowledge operates as an inductive bias and therefore has a constraining effect on the hypothesis space, i.e., the set of all possible functions that can be learned by the learning algorithm (Mitchell, 1980) .
While this sounds counter-intuitive such a reduction of the hypothesis space may lead to better generalization properties in practice (Mitchell, 1980) .
Hence, instead of eliminating the bias to increase generalization (as suggested by Hessel et al. (2019) ), a promising direction of research tries to identify and introduce the right form of it.
We can achieve this by limiting the functions that can be expressed by the learning algorithm or by introducing bias to the learning algorithm itself.
Simple examples include the choice for linear activations to only allow approximations of linear functions or to add a regularization term to the objective function.
Similar to this, we can also improve generalization by training on different tasks (Baxter, 2000) from a task family at the same time or by introducing auxiliary tasks (Jaderberg et al., 2017) .
This is commonly known as multitask learning and has shown to not only improve generalization properties but also to be more sample-efficient (Baxter, 2000) .
Due to the limited availability of data for training we need a well-tuned inductive bias.
Hence, such choices are crucial for the final real-world performance of any machine learning algorithm.
While multitask learning is a great tool to improve generalization and to reduce the amount of samples that are necessary to learn a family of tasks it is still limited in its scalability.
Both the amount of tasks that can be learned and the amount of data required to learn them are strongly limiting factors.
Consider, for instance, a reinforcement learning setup where an agent learns different tasks from interacting with in an environment.
In practice we are limited in storing the data for all relevant tasks required to train a model on all tasks jointly.
However, learning those tasks sequentially is also not an option as gradient descent and its variants (which are the dominant learning approaches for neural networks) do not consider the importance of individual parameters for early tasks.
This destructive learning is commonly termed as catastrophic forgetting (McCloskey & Cohen, 1989) .
While in the context of fine-tuning and pre-training (Erhan et al., 2009) this does not bear a problem (as the goal is not to reuse the previous parameter state, but rather to optimize the learning process for some target task) it becomes important in multitask problems where we wish to maximize generalization and sample-efficiency.
It is also critical in the continual learning framework, where the parameters of a neural network are optimized over multiple datasets (representing different tasks) provided sequentially, which are not available at later time.
The goal is hence to retain all (or most) of the important parameters for previous tasks and to be able to build-up on this knowledge for an arbitrary number of future tasks.
Thus, the scalability of learning would only be limited by the capacity of the neural network but not by the properties of the training method.
The Bayesian framework (Kirkpatrick et al., 2017; Ritter et al., 2018 ) is a promising approach to address catastrophic forgetting.
The information about former tasks is condensed in a prior, which not only preserves the knowledge about tasks but also introduces an inductive bias based on the learned tasks.
Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) (Kirkpatrick et al., 2017 ) is a simple yet efficient way to reduce catastrophic forgetting.
EWC approximates the prior with a Gaussian centered around the optimized network parameters for previous tasks, where the diagonal precision is given by the diagonal approximation of the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM).
This approach has two significant downsides:
i) each new task adds a new regularization term that penalizes changes of parameters that are relevant to previous tasks; and
ii) the diagonal approximation of the FIM assumes independent network parameters, which leads to information loss with a growing number of tasks.
Ritter et al. (2018) extend EWC but still approximate the prior from previous tasks using a Gaussian.
They devise a block-diagonal approximation for the prior from the older tasks by defining a quadratic approximation whose solution requires to calculate the Hessian.
The Hessian is in turn approximated by the block-diagonal Kronecker-factored approximation.
In this work we propose an alternative way of calculating the Hessian, based on well established Hessian-free (Schraudolph, 2002; Pearlmutter, 1994) methods to estimate curvature information of the network parameters.
In contrast to Ritter et al. (2018) , we exploit the fact that most regions in the loss surface are flat (Ghorbani et al., 2019) .
This allows us to use only a small subset of the Hessian as it holds enough relevant information.
We then use a Hessian-vector-product to sample from this subset.
This way, we can incorporate the importance of individual weights and include dependencies between the network parameters when we train the network over a long sequence of tasks.
We evaluate our algorithm on permuted MNIST (Kirkpatrick et al., 2017) , disjoint MNIST (Ritter et al., 2018) and single-headed disjoint MNIST (Farquhar & Gal, 2019) , and compare with state of the art approaches.
Our results show that we consistently outperform EWC across all tasks and that we are en par with Ritter et al. (2018) on the disjoint tasks, while our method has significantly lower space complexity compared to both EWC and Kronecker-factored approximation.
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows.
Section 2 provides background on continual learning, EWC, and Kronecker-factored Laplace approximation.
Section 3 describes our method in detail.
Section 4 shows the efficiency of our approach and compares it against state of the art on a variety of well-known task sequences.
Section 5 discusses related work.
Section 6 concludes.
This paper addressed catastrophic forgetting within a continual learning framework where the ultimate goal lies in the identification of the network weights that are important to previously learned tasks.
While previous work in this direction is either limited in the achievable accuracy (as it only considers the diagonal of the Fisher Information Matrix) or limited in number of tasks (as they need to store information that grows linearly with the number of tasks) we set out to provide a first approach that uses second-order parameter dependencies with constant space complexity.
We exploit the fact that most regions in the loss surface are flat, which allows us to use only a small subset of the Hessian as it holds enough relevant information.
We then use a Hessian-vector-product to sample from this subset.
This way, we can incorporate the importance of individual weights and include dependencies between the parameters when we train the network over a long task sequence.
We evaluated our algorithm on three widely used benchmarks and compared it with state of the art.
Our results show that we consistently outperform EWC across all benchmarks and that we are better or at least en par with Kronecker-factor approximation, while our method at the same time requires significantly less memory.

assistant: text: This paper provides an approach to address catastrophic forgetting via Hessian-free curvature estimates