Dissecting Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Learning by Deep Visualization

Abstract: Interpreting the behaviors of Deep Neural Networks (usually considered as a black box) is critical especially when they are now being widely adopted over diverse aspects of human life. Taking the advancements from Explainable Artificial Intelligent, this paper proposes a novel technique called Auto DeepVis to dissect catastrophic forgetting in continual learning. A new method to deal with catastrophic forgetting named critical freezing is also introduced upon investigating the dilemma by Auto DeepVis. Experiments on a captioning model meticulously present how catastrophic forgetting happens, particularly showing which components are forgetting or changing. The effectiveness of our technique is then assessed; and more precisely, critical freezing claims the best performance on both previous and coming tasks over baselines, proving the capability of the investigation. Our techniques could not only be supplementary to existing solutions for completely eradicating catastrophic forgetting for life-long learning but also explainable.