Contributed Talk: Lifelong Learning via Online Leverage Score Sampling

In order to mimic the human ability of continual acquisition and transfer of knowledge across various tasks, a learning system needs the capability for life-long learning, effectively utilizing the previously acquired skills. As such, the key challenge is to transfer and generalize the knowledge learned from one task to other tasks, avoiding interference from previous knowledge and improving the overall performance. In this paper, within the continual learning paradigm, we introduce a method that effectively forgets the less useful data samples continuously across different tasks. The method uses statistical leverage score information to measure the importance of the data samples in every task and adopts frequent directions approach to enable a life-long learning property. This effectively maintains a constant training size across all tasks. We first provide some mathematical intuition for the method and then demonstrate its effectiveness with experiments on variants of MNIST and CIFAR100 datasets.