Analysis of Overparameterization in Continual Learning under a Linear Model

Abstract: Autonomous machine learning systems that learn many tasks in sequence are prone to the catastrophic forgetting problem. Mathematical theory is needed in order to understand the extent of forgetting during continual learning. As a foundational step towards this goal, we study continual learning and catastrophic forgetting from a theoretical perspective in the simple setting of gradient descent with no explicit algorithmic mechanism to prevent forgetting. In this setting, we analytically demonstrate that overparameterization alone can mitigate forgetting in the context of a linear regression model. We consider a two-task setting motivated by permutation tasks, and show that as the overparameterization ratio becomes sufficiently high, a model trained on both tasks in sequence results in a low-risk estimator for the first task. As part of this work, we establish a non-asymptotic bound of the risk of a single linear regression task, which may be of independent interest to the field of double descent theory.