Overcoming Catastrophic Forgetting by Incremental Moment Matching

Catastrophic forgetting is a problem of neural networks that loses the information of the first task after training the second task. Here, we propose incremental moment matching (IMM) to resolve this problem. IMM incrementally matches the moment of the posterior distribution of neural networks, which is trained for the first and the second task, respectively. To make the search space of posterior parameter smooth, the IMM procedure is complemented by various transfer learning techniques including weight transfer, L2-norm of the old and the new parameter, and a variant of dropout with the old parameter. We analyze our approach on various datasets including the MNIST, CIFAR-10, Caltech-UCSD-Birds, and Lifelog datasets. Experimental results show that IMM achieves state-of-the-art performance in a variety of datasets and can balance the information between an old and a new network.