Title: A Theory and Practice of the Lifelong Learnable Forest
Abstract: Since Vapnik’s and Valiant’s seminal papers on learnability, various lines of research have generalized his concept of learning and learners. In this paper, we formally define what it means to be a lifelong learner. Given this definition, we propose the first lifelong learning algorithm with theoretical guarantees that it can perform forward transfer and reverse transfer, while not experiencing catastrophic forgetting. Our algorithm, dubbed Lifelong Learning Forests, outperforms the current state-of-the-art deep lifelong learning algorithm on the CIFAR 10-by-10 challenge problem, despite its simplicity and mathematical tractability. Our approach immediately lends to further algorithmic developments that promise to exceed current performance limits of existing approaches.