58,065 research outputs found
Different degrees of skill obsolescence across hard and soft skills and the role of lifelong learning for labor market outcomes
This paper examines the role of lifelong learning in counteracting skill depreciation and obsolescence. We differentiate between occupations with more hard skills versus more soft skills and draw on representative job advertisement data that contain machine-learning categorized skill requirements and cover the Swiss job market in great detail across occupations (from 1950 to 2019). We examine lifelong learning effects for âharderâ versus âsofterâ occupations, thereby analyzing the role of training in counteracting skill depreciation in occupations that are differently affected by skill depreciation. Our results reveal novel empirical patterns regarding the benefits of lifelong learning, which are consistent with theoretical explanations based on structurally different skill depreciation rates: In harder occupations, with large shares of fast-depreciating hard skills, the role of lifelong learning is primarily as a hedge against unemployment risks rather than a boost to wages. By contrast, in softer occupations, in which workers build on more value-stable soft-skill foundations, the role of lifelong learning instead lies mostly in acting as a boost for upward career mobility and leads to larger wage gains
Lifelong Federated Reinforcement Learning: A Learning Architecture for Navigation in Cloud Robotic Systems
This paper was motivated by the problem of how to make robots fuse and
transfer their experience so that they can effectively use prior knowledge and
quickly adapt to new environments. To address the problem, we present a
learning architecture for navigation in cloud robotic systems: Lifelong
Federated Reinforcement Learning (LFRL). In the work, We propose a knowledge
fusion algorithm for upgrading a shared model deployed on the cloud. Then,
effective transfer learning methods in LFRL are introduced. LFRL is consistent
with human cognitive science and fits well in cloud robotic systems.
Experiments show that LFRL greatly improves the efficiency of reinforcement
learning for robot navigation. The cloud robotic system deployment also shows
that LFRL is capable of fusing prior knowledge. In addition, we release a cloud
robotic navigation-learning website based on LFRL
Memory Aware Synapses: Learning what (not) to forget
Humans can learn in a continuous manner. Old rarely utilized knowledge can be
overwritten by new incoming information while important, frequently used
knowledge is prevented from being erased. In artificial learning systems,
lifelong learning so far has focused mainly on accumulating knowledge over
tasks and overcoming catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we argue that,
given the limited model capacity and the unlimited new information to be
learned, knowledge has to be preserved or erased selectively. Inspired by
neuroplasticity, we propose a novel approach for lifelong learning, coined
Memory Aware Synapses (MAS). It computes the importance of the parameters of a
neural network in an unsupervised and online manner. Given a new sample which
is fed to the network, MAS accumulates an importance measure for each parameter
of the network, based on how sensitive the predicted output function is to a
change in this parameter. When learning a new task, changes to important
parameters can then be penalized, effectively preventing important knowledge
related to previous tasks from being overwritten. Further, we show an
interesting connection between a local version of our method and Hebb's
rule,which is a model for the learning process in the brain. We test our method
on a sequence of object recognition tasks and on the challenging problem of
learning an embedding for predicting triplets.
We show state-of-the-art performance and, for the first time, the ability to
adapt the importance of the parameters based on unlabeled data towards what the
network needs (not) to forget, which may vary depending on test conditions.Comment: ECCV 201
Lifelong Generative Modeling
Lifelong learning is the problem of learning multiple consecutive tasks in a
sequential manner, where knowledge gained from previous tasks is retained and
used to aid future learning over the lifetime of the learner. It is essential
towards the development of intelligent machines that can adapt to their
surroundings. In this work we focus on a lifelong learning approach to
unsupervised generative modeling, where we continuously incorporate newly
observed distributions into a learned model. We do so through a student-teacher
Variational Autoencoder architecture which allows us to learn and preserve all
the distributions seen so far, without the need to retain the past data nor the
past models. Through the introduction of a novel cross-model regularizer,
inspired by a Bayesian update rule, the student model leverages the information
learned by the teacher, which acts as a probabilistic knowledge store. The
regularizer reduces the effect of catastrophic interference that appears when
we learn over sequences of distributions. We validate our model's performance
on sequential variants of MNIST, FashionMNIST, PermutedMNIST, SVHN and Celeb-A
and demonstrate that our model mitigates the effects of catastrophic
interference faced by neural networks in sequential learning scenarios.Comment: 32 page
Labour Market Information Driven, Personalized, OER Recommendation System for Lifelong Learners
In this paper, we suggest a novel method to aid lifelong learners to access
relevant OER based learning content to master skills demanded on the labour
market. Our software prototype 1) applies Text Classification and Text Mining
methods on vacancy announcements to decompose jobs into meaningful skills
components, which lifelong learners should target; and 2) creates a hybrid OER
Recommender System to suggest personalized learning content for learners to
progress towards their skill targets. For the first evaluation of this
prototype we focused on two job areas: Data Scientist, and Mechanical Engineer.
We applied our skill extractor approach and provided OER recommendations for
learners targeting these jobs. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured
interviews with 12 subject matter experts to learn how our prototype performs
in terms of its objectives, logic, and contribution to learning. More than 150
recommendations were generated, and 76.9% of these recommendations were treated
as useful by the interviewees. Interviews revealed that a personalized OER
recommender system, based on skills demanded by labour market, has the
potential to improve the learning experience of lifelong learners.Comment: This paper has been accepted to be published in the proceedings of
CSEDU 2020 by SciTePres
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
Lifelong Neural Predictive Coding: Learning Cumulatively Online without Forgetting
In lifelong learning systems, especially those based on artificial neural
networks, one of the biggest obstacles is the severe inability to retain old
knowledge as new information is encountered. This phenomenon is known as
catastrophic forgetting. In this article, we propose a new kind of
connectionist architecture, the Sequential Neural Coding Network, that is
robust to forgetting when learning from streams of data points and, unlike
networks of today, does not learn via the immensely popular back-propagation of
errors. Grounded in the neurocognitive theory of predictive processing, our
model adapts its synapses in a biologically-plausible fashion, while another,
complementary neural system rapidly learns to direct and control this
cortex-like structure by mimicking the task-executive control functionality of
the basal ganglia. In our experiments, we demonstrate that our self-organizing
system experiences significantly less forgetting as compared to standard neural
models and outperforms a wide swath of previously proposed methods even though
it is trained across task datasets in a stream-like fashion. The promising
performance of our complementary system on benchmarks, e.g., SplitMNIST, Split
Fashion MNIST, and Split NotMNIST, offers evidence that by incorporating
mechanisms prominent in real neuronal systems, such as competition, sparse
activation patterns, and iterative input processing, a new possibility for
tackling the grand challenge of lifelong machine learning opens up.Comment: Key updates including results on standard benchmarks, e.g., split
mnist/fmnist/not-mnist. Task selection/basal ganglia model has been
integrate
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