Accounting for the Effect of Inter-Task Similarity in Continual Learning Models
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Catastrophic forgetting has long been a major obstacle to continual learning. In this paper, we explore the effect of certain task characteristics, in particular inter-task similarity, on the extent of forgetting. Moreover, we experimentally study the effect of these characteristics on the effectiveness of recent state-of-the-art continual learning approaches. We show that the performance of some methods, for example, the recently proposed Learning without Forgetting (LwF) and elastic weight consolidation (EWC) models, is significantly dependent on these characteristics. We propose a rehearsal-based extension to continual learning models to address this vulnerability. We develop this extension first in the context of LwF and later demonstrate its effectiveness with other models such as EWC. We show that a memory budget of 1% of training data is sufficient to significantly improve on performance in cases of low inter-task similarity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".