Research

EWC / Permuted MNIST

Apr 2026

An experimental comparison of EWC, L2 regularization, and SGD across sequential Permuted MNIST tasks.

Illustration for EWC / Permuted MNIST

Research Question

How does protection against catastrophic forgetting change as a model learns more tasks?

Why It Matters

A continuously learning system needs to retain earlier knowledge while adapting to new tasks.

My Role

The project work includes a training and evaluation pipeline, comparative experiments, and result visualization.

Methodology

Compare SGD, L2 regularization, and Elastic Weight Consolidation on a sequence of 20 Permuted MNIST tasks.

Results and Evidence

The project records include per-task result tables and forgetting curves. Figures and reproducibility notes will be added here.

Limitations

A benchmark comparison is not evidence of general-purpose lifelong learning. Variation across random seeds also matters.

Reflection and Next Steps

Document the experimental setup and evaluate the stability of the comparison across repeated runs.