Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC): Nuts and Bolts

Summary

A short report that derives the Elastic Weight Consolidation loss introduced in Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks. Frames EWC as a quadratic penalty on parameter drift, weighted by a Fisher-information diagonal that marks weights important to previous tasks. Assumes the reader already knows continual-learning terms; no new algorithm or large-scale experiments on the abs. Discord posted the PDF of arXiv 2105.04093.

Keywords

ewc · elastic-weight-consolidation · continual-learning · catastrophic-forgetting · fisher-information

Topics

continual learning, EWC, catastrophic forgetting

Research notes

• Primary: arxiv abs (cs.CV; also cs.LG, stat.ML). License CC BY 4.0 on HTML at check. Discord posted PDF. No official code on the abs query. Not a new hosted corpus, so no datasets_local row. Cataloged from the matching abs even though the leftover link was the PDF.