LE3 .A278 2014

2014

Silver, Danny

Acadia University

Master of Science

Masters

Computer Science

Computer Science

Lifelong Machine Learning (LML) is concerned with machines that face a series of sequential learning tasks over time, and develop methods of retaining and us- ing prior learned knowledge to assist new learning. This thesis presents a LML system using a context-sensitive multiple task learning (csMTL) neural network, that functions as a consolidated domain knowledge (CDK) network. This re- search focuses on techniques to overcome the stability-plasticity problem in the context of back-propagation neural networks. Our goal is to develop an LML system that retains the knowledge of prior learned tasks without a decrease in the classi cation accuracy as new task knowledge is integrated into the CDK net- work. The experiments focus on the e ective retention of prior knowledge and the e ective consolidation of new knowledge. An independent test set accuracy is used as a measure of e ectiveness. We conduct sequential task learning ex- periments on a synthetic domain of twelve tasks, and three real-world domains. The studies indicate that csMTL CDK networks that have su cient representa- tion (two layers of hidden nodes), and use virtual examples that are generated based on knowledge of the input space result in e ective prior tasks retention and e ective new task consolidation when appropriate learning parameters are used.

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https://scholar.acadiau.ca/islandora/object/theses:369