arXiv AI

Beyond Parameter Protection: Fisher-Shaped EWC for Replay-Free Continual Learning

The paper introduces Fisher-Shaped EWC (FS‑EWC), a replay‑free continual learning method that extends Elastic Weight Consolidation by controlling Fisher sensitivity over a neighborhood of future updates. FS‑EWC minimizes the worst‑case empirical Fisher information trace during task learning, favoring solutions robust to bounded parameter displacement, and uses trajectory‑based model merging to construct the retained solution from multiple optimization states. Experiments on several benchmarks demonstrate that FS‑EWC outperforms standard EWC, achieving a better stability–plasticity balance and higher tolerance to parameter drift.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
6d ago

Beyond Parameter Protection: Fisher-Shaped EWC for Replay-Free Continual Learning

The paper introduces Fisher-Shaped EWC (FS‑EWC), a method that extends Elastic Weight Consolidation by controlling Fisher sensitivity over a neighborhood of potential future updates. FS‑EWC minimizes the worst‑case empirical Fisher information trace during task learning, favoring solutions less sensitive to bounded future displacement, and uses trajectory‑based model merging to construct the retained solution. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that FS‑EWC outperforms standard EWC, achieving a better stability–plasticity balance and greater tolerance to parameter drift.

arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

Trust Region Continual Learning as an Implicit Meta-Learner

The paper introduces Trust Region Continual Learning, a hybrid approach that blends generative replay with a Fisher-metric trust region constraint to address catastrophic forgetting in sequential task learning. It demonstrates that, under local approximations, the update can be interpreted as a single-step Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) process, where replay provides an old-task gradient and the Fisher penalty shapes curvature. Experiments on task-incremental diffusion image generation and continual diffusion-policy control show that this method achieves superior final performance, better retention, and faster early-task recovery compared to EWC, replay, and other continual meta-learning baselines.

By Zekun Wang, Anant Gupta, Christopher J. MacLellan
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Normative Loss Landscape Navigation: A Trajectory-Based Approach to Mitigating Forgetting in Incremental Learning

The paper introduces TMLN (Trajectory-Modulatory Landscape Navigation), a method that treats continual learning as an optimal control problem on a curved loss landscape. It uses a diagonal empirical Fisher Information Matrix to approximate a local Riemannian manifold and dynamically modulates a preconditioner based on the network’s historical parameter trajectory. This trajectory‑based preconditioning is integrated into gradient updates to protect important parameter directions without adding explicit penalties, and experiments on class‑ and domain‑incremental benchmarks show a significant reduction in the loss barrier between tasks.

By Isabelle Aguilar, Zayn Andre Zainal, Luis Fernando Herbozo Contreras, Zhaojing Huang, Omid Kavehei
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

Fine-Grained Analysis of Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Learning via Algorithmic Stability

The paper introduces an algorithmic stability framework to analyze catastrophic forgetting in continual learning using SGD, without assuming a specific model architecture. It decomposes forgetting into intra‑task and cross‑task generalization gaps plus empirical forgetting, and derives bounds for different learning‑rate schedules. Experiments on Split CIFAR‑100 and Split MiniImageNet illustrate the theoretical insights.

By Guodong Zheng, Yan Sun, Peng Wang, Enneng Yang, Jiafei Lyu, Xiaochun Cao, Dacheng Tao, Li Shen