Artificial neural networks suffer from catastrophic forgetting when they are sequentially trained on multiple tasks. To overcome this problem, we present a novel approach based on task-conditioned hypernetworks, i.e., networks that generate the weights of a target model based on task identity. Continual learning (CL) is less difficult for this class of models thanks to a simple key observation: instead of relying on recalling the input-output relations of all previously seen data, task-conditioned hypernetworks only require rehearsing previous weight realizations, which can be maintained in memory using a simple regularizer. Besides achieving good performance on standard CL benchmarks, additional experiments on long task sequences reveal that task-conditioned hypernetworks display an unprecedented capacity to retain previous memories. Notably, such long memory lifetimes are achieved in a compressive regime, when the number of trainable weights is comparable or smaller than target network size. We provide insight into the structure of low-dimensional task embedding spaces (the input space of the hypernetwork) and show that task-conditioned hypernetworks demonstrate transfer learning properties. Finally, forward information transfer is further supported by empirical results on a challenging CL benchmark based on the CIFAR-10/100 image datasets.

本文提出了一种基于任务条件化超网络的新方法，使得连续学习的模型可以通过简单的关键特征记住特定任务的权重实现在记忆中的持久化, 并在标准连续学习基准测试上达到了最先进的性能，同时揭示了该方法在迁移学习上的应用前景。

超网络的持续学习