Hyper-LifelongGAN: Scalable Lifelong Learning for Image Conditioned Generation

Deep neural networks are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting: when encountering a new task, they can only remember the new task and fail to preserve its ability to accomplish previously learned tasks. In this paper, we study the problem of lifelong learning for generative models and propose a novel and generic continual learning framework Hyper-LifelongGAN which is more scalable compared with state-of-the-art approaches. Given a sequence of tasks, the conventional convolutional filters are factorized into the dynamic base filters which are generated using task specific filter generators, and deterministic weight matrix which linearly combines the base filters and is shared across different tasks. Moreover, the shared weight matrix is multiplied by task specific coefficients to introduce more flexibility in combining task specific base filters differently for different tasks. Attributed to the novel architecture, the proposed method can preserve or even improve the generation quality at a low cost of parameters. We validate Hyper-LifelongGAN on diverse image-conditioned generation tasks, extensive ablation studies and comparisons with state-of-the-art models are carried out to show that the proposed approach can address catastrophic forgetting effectively.