{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/afec-active-forgetting-of-negative-transfer","title":"AFEC: Active Forgetting of Negative Transfer in Continual Learning","arxiv_id":"2110.12187","date":"2021-10-23","proceeding":"NeurIPS 2021 12","authors":["Liyuan Wang","Mingtian Zhang","Zhongfan Jia","Qian Li","Chenglong Bao","Kaisheng Ma","Jun Zhu","Yi Zhong"],"abstract":"Continual learning aims to learn a sequence of tasks from dynamic data distributions. Without accessing to the old training samples, knowledge transfer from the old tasks to each new task is difficult to determine, which might be either positive or negative. If the old knowledge interferes with the learning of a new task, i.e., the forward knowledge transfer is negative, then precisely remembering the old tasks will further aggravate the interference, thus decreasing the performance of continual learning. By contrast, biological neural networks can actively forget the old knowledge that conflicts with the learning of a new experience, through regulating the learning-triggered synaptic expansion and synaptic convergence. Inspired by the biological active forgetting, we propose to actively forget the old knowledge that limits the learning of new tasks to benefit continual learning. Under the framework of Bayesian continual learning, we develop a novel approach named Active Forgetting with synaptic Expansion-Convergence (AFEC). Our method dynamically expands parameters to learn each new task and then selectively combines them, which is formally consistent with the underlying mechanism of biological active forgetting. We extensively evaluate AFEC on a variety of continual learning benchmarks, including CIFAR-10 regression tasks, visual classification tasks and Atari reinforcement tasks, where AFEC effectively improves the learning of new tasks and achieves the state-of-the-art performance in a plug-and-play way.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.12187v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.12187v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"afec-active-forgetting-of-negative-transfer","repo_url":"https://github.com/lywang3081/AFEC","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"continual-learning","task_name":"Continual Learning"},{"task_slug":"transfer-learning","task_name":"Transfer Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2110.12187","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2110.12187"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/lywang3081/AFEC","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"summary":{"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"0f7fb2e8ce13ae2a","entry":"alexnet","repo":"lywang3081/AFEC","repo_kind":"official","path":"networks/alexnet.py","file_url":"https://github.com/lywang3081/AFEC/blob/HEAD/networks/alexnet.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"0f7fb2e8ce13ae2a"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}