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arXiv · 2205.09357

Continual Pre-Training Mitigates Forgetting in Language and Vision

Andrea Cossu·Tinne Tuytelaars·Antonio Carta·Lucia Passaro·Vincenzo Lomonaco·Davide Bacciu
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Abstract

Pre-trained models are nowadays a fundamental component of machine learning research. In continual learning, they are commonly used to initialize the model before training on the stream of non-stationary data. However, pre-training is rarely applied during continual learning. We formalize and investigate the characteristics of the continual pre-training scenario in both language and vision environments, where a model is continually pre-trained on a stream of incoming data and only later fine-tuned to different downstream tasks. We show that continually pre-trained models are robust against catastrophic forgetting and we provide strong empirical evidence supporting the fact that self-supervised pre-training is more effective in retaining previous knowledge than supervised protocols. Code is provided at https://github.com/AndreaCossu/continual-pretraining-nlp-vision .

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Andrea Cossu, Tinne Tuytelaars, Antonio Carta, Lucia Passaro, Vincenzo Lomonaco, Davide Bacciu. 2022-05-19. Continual Pre-Training Mitigates Forgetting in Language and Vision. https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.09357

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