Clustered Lifelong Learning Via Representative Task Selection

Abstract

Consider the lifelong machine learning problem where the objective is to learn new consecutive tasks depending on previously accumulated experiences, i.e., knowledge library. In comparison with most state-of-the-arts which adopt knowledge library with prescribed size, in this paper, we propose a new incremental clustered lifelong learning model with two libraries: feature library and model library, called Clustered Lifelong Learning (CL3), in which the feature library maintains a set of learned features common across all the encountered tasks, and the model library is learned by identifying and adding representative models (clusters). When a new task arrives, the original task model can be firstly reconstructed by representative models measured by capped l2-norm distance, i.e., effectively assigning the new task model to multiple representative models under feature library. Based on this assignment knowledge of new task, the objective of our CL3 model is to transfer the knowledge from both feature library and model library to learn the new task. The new task 1) with a higher outlier probability will then be judged as a new representative, and used to refine both feature library and representative models over time; 2) with lower outlier probability will only update the feature library. For the model optimisation, we cast this problem as an alternating direction minimization problem. To this end, the performance of CL3 is evaluated through comparing with most lifelong learning models, even some batch clustered multi-task learning models.