PARMESAN: Parameter-Free Memory Search and Transduction for Dense Prediction Tasks

In this work we address flexibility in deep learning by means of transductive reasoning. For adaptation to new tasks or new data, existing methods typically involve tuning of learnable parameters or even complete re-training from scratch, rendering such approaches unflexible in practice. We argue that the notion of separating computation from memory by the means of transduction can act as a stepping stone for solving these issues. We therefore propose PARMESAN (parameter-free memory search and transduction), a scalable transduction method which leverages a memory module for solving dense prediction tasks. At inference, hidden representations in memory are being searched to find corresponding examples. In contrast to other methods, PARMESAN learns without the requirement for any continuous training or fine-tuning of learnable parameters simply by modifying the memory content. Our method is compatible with commonly used neural architectures and canonically transfers to 1D, 2D, and 3D grid-based data. We demonstrate the capabilities of our approach at complex tasks such as continual and few-shot learning. PARMESAN learns up to 370 times faster than common baselines while being on par in terms of predictive performance, knowledge retention, and data-efficiency.