HyperMask: Adaptive Hypernetwork-based Masks for Continual Learning

Artificial neural networks suffer from catastrophic forgetting when they are sequentially trained on multiple tasks. To overcome this problem, there exist many continual learning strategies. One of the most effective is the hypernetwork-based approach. The hypernetwork generates the weights of a target model based on the task's identity. The model's main limitation is that hypernetwork can produce completely different nests for each task. Consequently, each task is solved separately. The model does not use information from the network dedicated to previous tasks and practically produces new architectures when it learns the subsequent tasks. To solve such a problem, we use the lottery ticket hypothesis, which postulates the existence of sparse subnetworks, named winning tickets, that preserve the performance of a full network.
In the paper, we propose a method called HyperMask, which trains a single network for all tasks. Hypernetwork produces semi-binary masks to obtain target subnetworks dedicated to new tasks. This solution inherits the ability of the hypernetwork to adapt to new tasks with minimal forgetting. Moreover, due to the lottery ticket hypothesis, we can use a single network with weighted subnets dedicated to each task.