Lifelong Machine Learning with Data Efficiency and Knowledge Retention

Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have become de facto tools in many real-life applications to offer a wide range of benefits for individuals and our society. A classic ML model is typically trained with a large-scale static dataset in an offline manner. Therefore, it can not quickly capture new knowledge in non-stationary environments, and it is difficult to maintain long-term memory for knowledge learned earlier. In practice, many ML systems often need to learn new knowledge (e.g., domains, tasks, distributions, etc.) as more data and experiences are collected, which is referred to as a lifelong ML paradigm in this thesis. We focus on two fundamental challenges to achieve lifelong learning. The first challenge is to quickly learn new knowledge with a small number of observations, and we refer to it as data efficiency. The second challenge is to prevent an ML system from forgetting the old knowledge it has previously learned, and we refer to this challenge as knowledge retention. These two capabilities are crucial for applying ML to most practical applications. In this thesis, we study three important applications with these two challenges, including recommendation systems, task-oriented dialog systems, and the image classification task.

First, we propose two approaches to improve data efficiency for task-oriented dialog systems. The first proposed approach is based on Meta-learning, aiming to learn a better model parameter initialization from training data. It can quickly reach a good parameter region of new domains or tasks with a small number of labeled data. The second proposal takes a semi-supervised self-training approach to iteratively train a better model using sufficient unlabeled data when only a limited number of labeled data are available. We empirically demonstrate that both approaches effectively improve data efficiency to learn new knowledge. The second self-training method even consistently improves state-of-the-art large-scale pre-trained models.

Second, we tackle the knowledge retention challenge to mitigate the detrimental catastrophic forgetting issue when neural networks learn new knowledge sequentially. We formulate and investigate the ``continual learning'' setting for task-oriented dialog systems and recommendation systems. Through extensive empirical evaluation and analysis, we demonstrate the importance of (1) exemplar replay: storing representative historical data and replaying them to the model while learning new knowledge; (2) dynamic regularization: applying a dynamic regularization term to put flexible constraints on not forgetting previously learned knowledge in each model update cycle.

Lastly, we conduct several initial attempts to achieve both data efficiency and knowledge retention in a unified framework. In the recommendation scenario, we propose two approaches using different non-parametric memory modules to retain long-term knowledge. More importantly, the two proposed non-parametric predictions computed on top of them help learn and memorize new knowledge in a data-efficient manner. Apart from the recommendation scenario, we propose a probabilistic evaluation protocol in the widely studied image classification domain. It is general and versatile to simulate a wide range of realistic lifelong learning scenarios that require both knowledge retention and data efficiency for studying different techniques. Through experiments, we also demonstrate the benefit