Bilevel Continual Learning

Continual learning aims to learn continuously from a stream of tasks and data in an online-learning fashion, being capable of exploiting what was learned previously to improve current and future tasks while still being able to perform well on the previous tasks. One common limitation of many existing continual learning methods is that they often train a model directly on all available training data without validation due to the nature of continual learning, thus suffering poor generalization at test time. In this work, we present a novel framework of continual learning named "Bilevel Continual Learning" (BCL) by unifying a {\it bilevel optimization} objective and a {\it dual memory management} strategy comprising both episodic memory and generalization memory to achieve effective knowledge transfer to future tasks and alleviate catastrophic forgetting on old tasks simultaneously. Our extensive experiments on continual learning benchmarks demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed BCL compared to many state-of-the-art methods. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/phquang/bilevel-continual-learning

Investigating Bi-Level Optimization for Learning and Vision from a Unified Perspective: A Survey and Beyond

Bi-Level Optimization (BLO) is originated from the area of economic game theory and then introduced into the optimization community. BLO is able to handle problems with a hierarchical structure, involving two levels of optimization tasks, where one task is nested inside the other. In machine learning and computer vision fields, despite the different motivations and mechanisms, a lot of complex problems, such as hyper-parameter optimization, multi-task and meta-learning, neural architecture search, adversarial learning and deep reinforcement learning, actually all contain a series of closely related subproblms. In this paper, we first uniformly express these complex learning and vision problems from the perspective of BLO. Then we construct a best-response-based single-level reformulation and establish a unified algorithmic framework to understand and formulate mainstream gradient-based BLO methodologies, covering aspects ranging from fundamental automatic differentiation schemes to various accelerations, simplifications, extensions and their convergence and complexity properties. Last but not least, we discuss the potentials of our unified BLO framework for designing new algorithms and point out some promising directions for future research.Comment: 23 page