機器的終身學習著重於使模型適應新來的任務、並且不會遺忘過去學習過的任務；而小樣本學習則致力於利用極少量的學習樣本即可學習當前的任務。這兩種機器學習的研究領域在人工智慧的泛化學習能力站著極重要的地位。然而目前現存此兩方領域的研究文本時常在訓練模型時設立了脫離實際應用面的假設。在機器終身學習中，測試階段的任務數量假設已知，以至於在訓練時可以事先將模型的大小為測試階段客製化；而在小樣本學習中，則經常假設訓練時可以隨時獲取大量訓練任務以供模型參考。然而人類則可以不需要上述假設，也可以達到終身學習與小樣本學習的目標。本論文將上述假設放寬，提出任務不確定終身學習以及有序小樣本學習兩項問題，同時也從人類的學習模式啟發，提出STL(Slow Thinking to Learn)模型，利用非參數記憶模型儲存的過去資訊以及慢思模型(Slow Thinker)的相互影響，即執行期花費時間對相應任務的儲存內容進行適配，讓模型能在終身學習的條件設定下解決上述提出的兩項問題。與此同時，本論文也提出叢集展開的方式，整合STL模型的儲存空間，使其在節省空間的同時保有水塘抽樣的效果。

Lifelong machine learning focuses on adapting to novel tasks without forgetting the old tasks, whereas few-shot learning strives to learn a single task given a small amount of data. These two different research areas are crucial for artificial general intelligence, however, their existing studies have somehow assumed some impractical settings when training the models. For lifelong learning, the nature (or the quantity) of incoming tasks during inference time is assumed to be known at training time. As for few-shot learning, it is commonly assumed that a large number of tasks is available during training. Humans, on the other hand, can perform these learning tasks without regard to the aforementioned assumptions. Inspired by how the human brain works, we propose a novel model, called the Slow Thinking to Learn (STL), that makes sophisticated (and slightly slower) predictions by iteratively considering interactions between current and previously seen tasks at runtime. Meanwhile, we propose a fixed-size storage method to improve storage efficiency for STL model, letting the required memory space constant along the training procedure. STL has two specialized modules, called the Slow Predictor (SP) and Fast Learners (FLs), that are responsible for making lifelong and few-shot predictions, respectively, yet designed to complement each other to be properly trained even without fulfilling the above assumptions. Having conducted experiments, the results empirically demonstrate the effectiveness of STL for more realistic lifelong and few-shot learning settings.

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