Standard artificial neural networks suffer from the well-known issue of catastrophic forgetting, making continual or lifelong learning problematic. Recently, numerous methods have been proposed for continual learning, but due to differences in evaluation protocols it is difficult to directly compare their performance. To enable more meaningful comparisons, we identified three distinct continual learning scenarios based on whether task identity is known and, if it is not, whether it needs to be inferred. Performing the split and permuted MNIST task protocols according to each of these scenarios, we found that regularization-based approaches (e.g., elastic weight consolidation) failed when task identity needed to be inferred. In contrast, generative replay combined with distillation (i.e., using class probabilities as "soft targets") achieved superior performance in all three scenarios. In addition, we reduced the computational cost of generative replay by integrating the generative model into the main model by equipping it with generative feedback connections. This Replay-through-Feedback approach substantially shortened training time with no or negligible loss in performance. We believe this to be an important first step towards making the powerful technique of generative replay scalable to real-world continual learning applications.

本文的主要研究方向是解决人工神经网络在学习新任务时会快速遗忘以前学到的任务而导致无法实现真正的生命周期学习的问题，该文提出了一种新的方法，即基于生成回放的连续学习方法，该方法可以在各种不同的场景下实现优异的性能表现。

生成回放与反馈连接作为连续学习的通用策略