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arXiv · 2306.09890

Studying Generalization on Memory-Based Methods in Continual Learning

Felipe del Rio·Julio Hurtado·Cristian Buc·Alvaro Soto·Vincenzo Lomonaco
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Abstract

One of the objectives of Continual Learning is to learn new concepts continually over a stream of experiences and at the same time avoid catastrophic forgetting. To mitigate complete knowledge overwriting, memory-based methods store a percentage of previous data distributions to be used during training. Although these methods produce good results, few studies have tested their out-of-distribution generalization properties, as well as whether these methods overfit the replay memory. In this work, we show that although these methods can help in traditional in-distribution generalization, they can strongly impair out-of-distribution generalization by learning spurious features and correlations. Using a controlled environment, the Synbol benchmark generator (Lacoste et al., 2020), we demonstrate that this lack of out-of-distribution generalization mainly occurs in the linear classifier.

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Felipe del Rio, Julio Hurtado, Cristian Buc, Alvaro Soto, Vincenzo Lomonaco. 2023-06-16. Studying Generalization on Memory-Based Methods in Continual Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.09890

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