Overcoming catastrophic forgetting by neuron-level plasticity control

Abstract

To address the issue of catastrophic forgetting in neural networks, we propose a novel, simple, and effective solution called neuron-level plasticity control (NPC). While learning a new task, the proposed method preserves the existing knowledge from the previous tasks by controlling the plasticity of the network at the neuron level. NPC estimates the importance value of each neuron and consolidates important neurons by applying lower learning rates, rather than restricting individual connection weights to stay close to the values optimized for the previous tasks. The experimental results on the several datasets show that neuron-level consolidation is substantially more effective compared to connection-level consolidation approaches.