Avoiding Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Learning through Elastic Weight Consolidation

Sammanfattning: Image classification is an area of computer science with many areas of application. One key issue with using Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) for image classification is the phenomenon of Catastrophic Forgetting when training tasks sequentially (i.e Continual Learning). This is when the network quickly looses its performance on a given task after it has been trained on a new task. Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) has previously been proposed as a remedy to lessen the effects of this phenomena through the use of a loss function which utilizes a Fisher Information Matrix. We want to explore and establish if this still holds true for modern network architectures, and to what extent this can be applied using today’s state- of- the- art networks. We focus on applying this approach on tasks within the same dataset. Our results indicate that the approach is feasible, and does in fact lessen the effect of Catastrophic Forgetting. These results are achieved, however, at the cost of much longer execution times and time spent tuning the hyper- parameters.