On Robust Incremental Learning over Many Multilingual Steps

Abstract: Recent work in incremental learning has introduced diverse approaches to tackle catastrophic forgetting from data augmentation to optimized training regimes. However, most of them focus on very few training steps. We propose a method for robust incremental learning over dozens of fine-tuning steps using data from a variety of languages. We show that a combination of data-augmentation and an optimized training regime allows us to continue improving the model even for as many as fifty training steps. Crucially, our augmentation strategy does not require retaining access to previous training data and is suitable in scenarios with privacy constraints.