Continual Learning via Hessian-Aware Low-Rank Perturbation

Continual learning aims to learn a series of tasks sequentially without forgetting the knowledge acquired from the previous ones. In this work, we propose the Hessian-Aware Low-Rank Perturbation (HALRP) algorithm for continual learning. By modeling the parameter transitions along the sequential tasks with the weight matrix transformation, we propose to apply the low-rank approximation on the task-adaptive parameters in each layer of the neural networks. Specifically, we theoretically demonstrate the quantitative relationship between Hessian information and the proposed low-rank approximation. The approximation ranks are then globally determined according to the marginal change of the empirical loss estimated by the layer-specific gradient and low-rank approximation error. Furthermore, we control the model capacity by pruning the less important parameters to diminish the parameter growth. We conduct extensive experiments on various benchmarks, including a dataset with large-scale tasks, and compare our method against some recent state-of-the-art methods to demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of our proposed method. Empirical results show that our method performs better on different benchmarks, especially in achieving task order robustness and handling the forgetting issue. The source code is at https://github.com/lijiaqi/HALRP.