Energy-Based Models for Continual Learning
Authors: Shuang Li, Yilun Du, Gido Martijn van de Ven, Antonio Torralba, Igor Mordatch
Keywords: Continual learning, Energy-based model
Abstract: We motivate Energy-Based Models (EBMs) as a promising model class for continual learning problems. Instead of tackling continual learning via the use of external memory, growing models, or regularization, EBMs have a natural way to support a dynamically-growing number of tasks and classes and less interference with old tasks. We show that EBMs are adaptable to a more general continual learning setting where the data distribution changes without the notion of explicitly delineated tasks. We also find that EBMs outperform the baseline methods by a large margin on several continual learning benchmarks. These observations point towards EBMs as a class of models naturally inclined towards the continual learning regime.