Online Deep Learning: Learning Deep Neural Networks on the Fly

Abstract

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) are typically trained by backpropagation in a batch setting, requiring the entire training data to be made available prior to the learning task. This is not scalable for many real-world scenarios where new data arrives sequentially in a stream. We aim to address an open challenge of ``Online Deep Learning" (ODL) for learning DNNs on the fly in an online setting. Unlike traditional online learning that often optimizes some convex objective function with respect to a shallow model (e.g., a linear/kernel-based hypothesis), ODL is more challenging as the optimization objective is non-convex, and regular DNN with standard backpropagation does not work well in practice for online settings. We present a new ODL framework that attempts to tackle the challenges by learning DNN models which dynamically adapt depth from a sequence of training data in an online learning setting. Specifically, we propose a novel Hedge Backpropagation (HBP) method for online updating the parameters of DNN effectively, and validate the efficacy on large data sets (both stationary and concept drifting scenarios).