We study the issue of catastrophic forgetting in the context of neural multimodal approaches to Visual Question Answering (VQA). Motivated by evidence from psycholinguistics, we devise a set of linguistically-informed VQA tasks, which differ by the types of questions involved (Wh-questions and polar questions). We test what impact task difficulty has on continual learning, and whether the order in which a child acquires question types facilitates computational models. Our results show that dramatic forgetting is at play and that task difficulty and order matter. Two well-known current continual learning methods mitigate the problem only to a limiting degree.
@article{arxiv.1906.04229,
title = {Psycholinguistics meets Continual Learning: Measuring Catastrophic Forgetting in Visual Question Answering},
author = {Claudio Greco and Barbara Plank and Raquel Fernández and Raffaella Bernardi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.04229},
year = {2019}
}