  Continual learning aims to improve the ability of modern learning systems to
deal with non-stationary distributions, typically by attempting to learn a
series of tasks sequentially. Prior art in the field has largely considered
supervised or reinforcement learning tasks, and often assumes full knowledge of
task labels and boundaries. In this work, we propose an approach (CURL) to
tackle a more general problem that we will refer to as unsupervised continual
learning. The focus is on learning representations without any knowledge about
task identity, and we explore scenarios when there are abrupt changes between
tasks, smooth transitions from one task to another, or even when the data is
shuffled. The proposed approach performs task inference directly within the
model, is able to dynamically expand to capture new concepts over its lifetime,
and incorporates additional rehearsal-based techniques to deal with
catastrophic forgetting. We demonstrate the efficacy of CURL in an unsupervised
learning setting with MNIST and Omniglot, where the lack of labels ensures no
information is leaked about the task. Further, we demonstrate strong
performance compared to prior art in an i.i.d setting, or when adapting the
technique to supervised tasks such as incremental class learning.
