Catastrophic forgetting -- the tendency of neural networks to forget previously learned data when learning new information -- remains a central challenge in continual learning. In this work, we adopt a behavioral approach, observing a connection between learning speed and forgetting: examples learned more quickly are less prone to forgetting. Focusing on replay-based continual learning, we show that the composition of the replay buffer -- specifically, whether it contains quickly or slowly learned examples -- has a significant effect on forgetting. Motivated by this insight, we introduce Speed-Based Sampling (SBS), a simple yet general strategy that selects replay examples based on their learning speed. SBS integrates easily into existing buffer-based methods and improves performance across a wide range of competitive continual learning benchmarks, advancing state-of-the-art results. Our findings underscore the value of accounting for the forgetting dynamics when designing continual learning algorithms.

In the domain of Active Learning (AL), a learner actively selects which unlabeled examples to seek labels from an oracle, while operating within predefined budget constraints. Importantly, it has been recently shown that distinct query strategies are better suited for different conditions and budgetary constraints. In practice, the determination of the most appropriate AL strategy for a given situation remains an open problem. To tackle this challenge, we propose a practical derivative-based method that dynamically identifies the best strategy for a given budget. Intuitive motivation for our approach is provided by the theoretical analysis of a simplified scenario. We then introduce a method to dynamically select an AL strategy, which takes into account the unique characteristics of the problem and the available budget. Empirical results showcase the effectiveness of our approach across diverse budgets and computer vision tasks.

The learning trajectories of linguistic phenomena in humans provide insight into linguistic representation, beyond what can be gleaned from inspecting the behavior of an adult speaker.To apply a similar approach to analyze neural language models (NLM), it is first necessary to establish that different models are similar enough in the generalizations they make.In this paper, we show that NLMs with different initialization, architecture, and training data acquire linguistic phenomena in a similar order, despite their different end performance.These findings suggest that there is some mutual inductive bias that underlies these models' learning of linguistic phenomena.Taking inspiration from psycholinguistics, we argue that studying this inductive bias is an opportunity to study the linguistic representation implicit in NLMs.Leveraging these findings, we compare the relative performance on different phenomena at varying learning stages with simpler reference models.Results suggest that NLMs exhibit consistent "developmental" stages.Moreover, we find the learning trajectory to be approximately one-dimensional: given an NLM with a certain overall performance, it is possible to predict what linguistic generalizations it has already acquired.Initial analysis of these stages presents phenomena clusters (notably morphological ones), whose performance progresses in unison, suggesting a potential link between the generalizations behind them.

Investigating active learning, we focus on the relation between the number of labeled examples (budget size), and suitable querying strategies. Our theoretical analysis shows a behavior reminiscent of phase transition: typical examples are best queried when the budget is low, while unrepresentative examples are best queried when the budget is large. Combined evidence shows that a similar phenomenon occurs in common classification models. Accordingly, we propose TypiClust – a deep active learning strategy suited for low budgets. In a comparative empirical investigation of supervised learning, using a variety of architectures and image datasets, TypiClust outperforms all other active learning strategies in the low-budget regime. Using TypiClust in the semi-supervised framework, performance gets an even more significant boost. In particular, state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods trained on CIFAR-10 with 10 labeled examples selected by TypiClust, reach 93.2% accuracy – an improvement of 39.4% over random selection. Code is available at https://github.com/avihu111/TypiClust.

Deep active learning aims to reduce the annotation cost for the training of deep models, which is notoriously data-hungry. Until recently, deep active learning methods were ineffectual in the low-budget regime, where only a small number of examples are annotated. The situation has been alleviated by recent advances in representation and self-supervised learning, which impart the geometry of the data representation with rich information about the points. Taking advantage of this progress, we study the problem of subset selection for annotation through a “covering” lens, proposing ProbCover – a new active learning algorithm for the low budget regime, which seeks to maximize Probability Coverage. We then describe a dual way to view the proposed formulation, from which one can derive strategies suitable for the high budget regime of active learning, related to existing methods like Coreset. We conclude with extensive experiments, evaluating ProbCover in the low-budget regime. We show that our principled active learning strategy improves the state-of-the-art in the low-budget regime in several image recognition benchmarks. This method is especially beneficial in the semi-supervised setting, allowing state-of-the-art semi-supervised methods to match the performance of fully supervised methods, while using much fewer labels nonetheless. Code is available at https://github.com/avihu111/TypiClust.

Recent work suggests that convolutional neural networks of different architectures learn to classify images in the same order. To understand this phenomenon, we revisit the over-parametrized deep linear network model. Our analysis reveals that, when the hidden layers are wide enough, the convergence rate of this model's parameters is exponentially faster along the directions of the larger principal components of the data, at a rate governed by the corresponding singular values. We term this convergence pattern the Principal Components bias (PC-bias). Empirically, we show how the PC-bias streamlines the order of learning of both linear and non-linear networks, more prominently at earlier stages of learning. We then compare our results to the simplicity bias, showing that both biases can be seen independently, and affect the order of learning in different ways. Finally, we discuss how the PC-bias may explain some benefits of early stopping and its connection to PCA, and why deep networks converge more slowly with random labels.

We report a series of robust empirical observations, demonstrating that deep Neural Networks learn the examples in both the training and test sets in a similar order. This phenomenon is observed in all the commonly used benchmarks we evaluated, including many image classification benchmarks, and one text classification benchmark. While this phenomenon is strongest for models of the same architecture, it also crosses architectural boundaries – models of different architectures start by learning the same examples, after which the more powerful model may continue to learn additional examples. We further show that this pattern of results reflects the interplay between the way neural networks learn benchmark datasets. Specifically, when fixing the architecture, we describe synthetic datasets for which this pattern is no longer observed. When fixing the dataset, we show that other learning paradigms may learn the data in a different order. We hypothesize that our results reflect how neural networks discover structure in natural datasets.

Training neural networks is traditionally done by providing a sequence of random mini-batches sampled uniformly from the entire training data. In this work, we analyze the effect of curriculum learning, which involves the non-uniform sampling of mini-batches, on the training of deep networks, and specifically CNNs trained for image recognition. To employ curriculum learning, the training algorithm must resolve 2 problems: (i) sort the training examples by difficulty; (ii) compute a series of mini-batches that exhibit an increasing level of difficulty. We address challenge (i) using two methods: transfer learning from some competitive “teacher" network, and bootstrapping. In our empirical evaluation, both methods show similar benefits in terms of increased learning speed and improved final performance on test data. We address challenge (ii) by investigating different pacing functions to guide the sampling. The empirical investigation includes a variety of network architectures, using images from CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and subsets of ImageNet. We conclude with a novel theoretical analysis of curriculum learning, where we show how it effectively modifies the optimization landscape. We then define the concept of an ideal curriculum, and show that under mild conditions it does not change the corresponding global minimum of the optimization function.