Reset It and Forget It: Relearning Last-Layer Weights Improves Continual and Transfer Learning

Abstract

This work identifies a simple pre-training mechanism that leads to representations exhibiting better continual and transfer learning. This mechanism-the repeated resetting of weights in the last layer, which we nickname “zapping”-was originally designed for a meta-continual-learning procedure, yet we show it is surprisingly applicable in many settings beyond both meta-learning and continual learning. In our experiments, we wish to transfer a pretrained image classifier to a new set of classes, in few shots. We show that our zapping procedure results in improved transfer accuracy and/or more rapid adaptation in both standard fine-tuning and continual learning settings, while being simple to implement and computationally efficient. In many cases, we achieve performance on par with state of the art meta-learning without needing the expensive higher-order gradients by using a combination of zapping and sequential learning. An intuitive explanation for the effectiveness of this zapping procedure is that representations trained with repeated zapping learn features that are capable of rapidly adapting to newly initialized classifiers. Such an approach may be considered a computationally cheaper type of, or alternative to, meta-learning rapidly adaptable features with higher-order gradients. This adds to recent work on the usefulness of resetting neural network parameters during training, and invites further investigation of this mechanism.