Papers › Generalisation Guarantees for Continual Learning with Orthogonal Gradient Descent

Generalisation Guarantees for Continual Learning with Orthogonal Gradient Descent

21 Jun 2020arXiv:2006.11942archive 2025-07-28

Mehdi Abbana Bennani, Thang Doan, Masashi Sugiyama

In Continual Learning settings, deep neural networks are prone to Catastrophic Forgetting. Orthogonal Gradient Descent was proposed to tackle the challenge. However, no theoretical guarantees have been proven yet. We present a theoretical framework to study Continual Learning algorithms in the Neural Tangent Kernel regime. This framework comprises closed form expression of the model through tasks and proxies for Transfer Learning, generalisation and tasks similarity. In this framework, we prove that OGD is robust to Catastrophic Forgetting then derive the first generalisation bound for SGD and OGD for Continual Learning. Finally, we study the limits of this framework in practice for OGD and highlight the importance of the Neural Tangent Kernel variation for Continual Learning with OGD.

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