Scalable Recollections for Continual Lifelong Learning

Given the recent success of Deep Learning applied to a variety of single tasks, it is natural to consider more human-realistic settings. Perhaps the most difficult of these settings is that of continual lifelong learning, where the model must learn online over a continuous stream of non-stationary data. A successful continual lifelong learning system must have three key capabilities: it must learn and adapt over time, it must not forget what it has learned, and it must be efficient in both training time and memory. Recent techniques have focused their efforts primarily on the first two capabilities while questions of efficiency remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we consider the problem of efficient and effective storage of experiences over very large time-frames. In particular we consider the case where typical experiences are O(n) bits and memories are limited to O(k) bits for k << n. We present a novel scalable architecture and training algorithm in this challenging domain and provide an extensive evaluation of its performance. Our results show that we can achieve considerable gains on top of state-of-the-art methods such as GEM.Comment: AAAI 201

An Introduction to Neural Data Compression

Neural compression is the application of neural networks and other machine learning methods to data compression. Recent advances in statistical machine learning have opened up new possibilities for data compression, allowing compression algorithms to be learned end-to-end from data using powerful generative models such as normalizing flows, variational autoencoders, diffusion probabilistic models, and generative adversarial networks. The present article aims to introduce this field of research to a broader machine learning audience by reviewing the necessary background in information theory (e.g., entropy coding, rate-distortion theory) and computer vision (e.g., image quality assessment, perceptual metrics), and providing a curated guide through the essential ideas and methods in the literature thus far