Psycholinguistics meets Continual Learning: Measuring Catastrophic Forgetting in Visual Question Answering

ACL 2019 · Claudio Greco, Barbara Plank, Raquel Fernández, Raffaella Bernardi ·

We study the issue of catastrophic forgetting in the context of neural multimodal approaches to Visual Question Answering (VQA). Motivated by evidence from psycholinguistics, we devise a set of linguistically-informed VQA tasks, which differ by the types of questions involved (Wh-questions and polar questions). We test what impact task difficulty has on continual learning, and whether the order in which a child acquires question types facilitates computational models. Our results show that dramatic forgetting is at play and that task difficulty and order matter. Two well-known current continual learning methods mitigate the problem only to a limiting degree.