Lifelong Machine Learning with Deep Streaming Linear Discriminant Analysis

When an agent acquires new information, ideally it would immediately be capable of using that information to understand its environment. This is not possible using conventional deep neural networks, which suffer from catastrophic forgetting when they are incrementally updated, with new knowledge overwriting established representations. A variety of approaches have been developed that attempt to mitigate catastrophic forgetting in the incremental batch learning scenario, where a model learns from a series of large collections of labeled samples. However, in this setting, inference is only possible after a batch has been accumulated, which prohibits many applications. An alternative paradigm is online learning in a single pass through the training dataset on a resource constrained budget, which is known as streaming learning. Streaming learning has been much less studied in the deep learning community. In streaming learning, an agent learns instances one-by-one and can be tested at any time, rather than only after learning a large batch. Here, we revisit streaming linear discriminant analysis, which has been widely used in the data mining research community. By combining streaming linear discriminant analysis with deep learning, we are able to outperform both incremental batch learning and streaming learning algorithms on both ImageNet ILSVRC-2012 and CORe50, a dataset that involves learning to classify from temporally ordered samples(1).