Learning Continually from Low-shot Data Stream

Abstract

While deep learning has achieved remarkable results on various applications, it is usually data hungry and struggles to learn over non-stationary data stream. To solve these two limits, the deep learning model should not only be able to learn from a few of data, but also incrementally learn new concepts from data stream over time without forgetting the previous knowledge. Limited literature simultaneously address both problems. In this work, we propose a novel approach, MetaCL, which enables neural networks to effectively learn meta knowledge from low-shot data stream without catastrophic forgetting. MetaCL trains a model to exploit the intrinsic feature of data (i.e. meta knowledge) and dynamically penalize the important model parameters change to preserve learned knowledge. In this way, the deep learning model can efficiently obtain new knowledge from small volume of data and still keep high performance on previous tasks. MetaCL is conceptually simple, easy to implement and model-agnostic. We implement our method on three recent regularization-based methods. Extensive experiments show that our approach leads to state-of-the-art performance on image classification benchmarks.