Knowledge-Adaptation Priors
Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan, Siddharth Swaroop
Abstract
Humans and animals have a natural ability to quickly adapt to their surroundings, but machine-learning models, when subjected to changes, often require a complete retraining from scratch. We present Knowledge-adaptation priors (K-priors) to reduce the cost of retraining by enabling quick and accurate adaptation for a wide-variety of tasks and models. This is made possible by a combination of weight and function-space priors to reconstruct the gradients of the past, which recovers and generalizes many existing, but seemingly-unrelated, adaptation strategies. Training with simple first-order gradient methods can often recover the exact retrained model to an arbitrary accuracy by choosing a sufficiently large memory of the past data. Empirical results show that adaptation with K-priors achieves performance similar to full retraining, but only requires training on a handful of past examples.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{
khan2021knowledgeadaptation,
title={Knowledge-Adaptation Priors},
author={Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan and Siddharth Swaroop},
booktitle={Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems},
editor={A. Beygelzimer and Y. Dauphin and P. Liang and J. Wortman Vaughan},
year={2021},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=_cXX-Dr7sf0}
}