La-MAML: Look-Ahead Meta-Learning for Continual Learning

A pictoral depiction of the La-MAML algorithm

Abstract

The continual learning problem involves training models with limited capacity to perform well on a set of an unknown number of sequentially arriving tasks. While meta-learning shows great potential for reducing interference between old and new tasks, the current training procedures tend to be either slow or offline, and sensitive to many hyper-parameters. In this work, we propose Look-ahead MAML (La-MAML), a fast optimisation-based meta-learning algorithm for online-continual learning, aided by a small episodic memory. Our proposed modulation of per-parameter learning rates in our meta-learning update allows us to draw connections to prior work on hypergradients and meta-descent. This provides a more flexible and efficient way to mitigate catastrophic forgetting compared to conventional prior-based methods.La-MAML achieves performance superior to other replay-based, prior-based and meta-learning based approaches for continual learning on real-world visual classification benchmarks.

Publication
In Neural Information Processing Systems 2020 (Oral)
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Karmesh Yadav
Karmesh Yadav
Ph.D. Student at Georgia Tech

My research interests include Embodied AI, Robotics and Reinforcement Learning.

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