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Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks

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arxiv 1612.00796 v2 pith:36TDEJBL submitted 2016-12-02 cs.LG cs.AIstat.ML

Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks

classification cs.LG cs.AIstat.ML
keywords tasksnetworksapproachcatastrophicforgettinglearningneuralability
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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The ability to learn tasks in a sequential fashion is crucial to the development of artificial intelligence. Neural networks are not, in general, capable of this and it has been widely thought that catastrophic forgetting is an inevitable feature of connectionist models. We show that it is possible to overcome this limitation and train networks that can maintain expertise on tasks which they have not experienced for a long time. Our approach remembers old tasks by selectively slowing down learning on the weights important for those tasks. We demonstrate our approach is scalable and effective by solving a set of classification tasks based on the MNIST hand written digit dataset and by learning several Atari 2600 games sequentially.

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Cited by 13 Pith papers

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