Learngene: Inheriting Condensed Knowledge from the Ancestry Model to Descendant Models
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During the continuous evolution of one organism's ancestry, its genes accumulate extensive experiences and knowledge, enabling newborn descendants to rapidly adapt to their specific environments. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel machine learning paradigm Learngene to enable learning models to incorporate three key characteristics of genes. (i) Accumulating: the knowledge is accumulated during the continuous learning of an ancestry model. (ii) Condensing: the exhaustive accumulated knowledge is condensed into a much more compact information piece, learngene. (iii): Inheriting: the condensed learngene is inherited to make it easier for descendant models to adapt to new environments. Since accumulating has been studied in some well-developed paradigms like large-scale pre-training and lifelong learning, we focus on condensing and inheriting, which induces three key issues and we provide the preliminary solutions to these issues in this paper: (i) Learngene Form: the learngene is set to a few integral layers that can preserve the most commonality. (ii) Learngene Condensing: we identify which layers among the ancestry model have the most similarity as one pseudo descendant model. (iii) Learngene Inheriting: to construct distinct descendant models for specific downstream tasks, we stack some randomly initialized layers to the learngene layers. Extensive experiments of various settings, including using different network architectures like Vision Transformer (ViT) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) on different datasets, are carried out to confirm five advantages and two characteristics of Learngene.
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