Eliminating Catastrophic Interference with Biased Competition

TL;DR

This paper introduces a neural network model inspired by neuroscience to improve multi-task learning by separating tasks and avoiding catastrophic interference, demonstrated on visual question answering datasets.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel end-to-end multi-task learning model based on biased competition, eliminating the need for task labels and reformatting, inspired by neuronal attention theory.

Findings

Eliminates catastrophic interference in multi-task learning.

Achieves competitive results on visual question answering datasets.

Introduces a new toy dataset, MNIST-QA, for low-dimensional VQA testing.

Abstract

We present here a model to take advantage of the multi-task nature of complex datasets by learning to separate tasks and subtasks in and end to end manner by biasing competitive interactions in the network. This method does not require additional labelling or reformatting of data in a dataset. We propose an alternate view to the monolithic one-task-fits-all learning of multi-task problems, and describe a model based on a theory of neuronal attention from neuroscience, proposed by Desimone. We create and exhibit a new toy dataset, based on the MNIST dataset, which we call MNIST-QA, for testing Visual Question Answering architectures in a low-dimensional environment while preserving the more difficult components of the Visual Question Answering task, and demonstrate the proposed network architecture on this new dataset, as well as on COCO-QA and DAQUAR-FULL. We then demonstrate that this model eliminates catastrophic interference between tasks on a newly created toy dataset and provides competitive results in the Visual Question Answering space. We provide further evidence that Visual Question Answering can be approached as a multi-task problem, and demonstrate that this new architecture based on the Biased Competition model is capable of learning to separate and learn the tasks in an end-to-end fashion without the need for task labels.