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Main Authors: Barry, Martin, Gerstner, Wulfram, Bellec, Guillaume
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.01690
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author Barry, Martin
Gerstner, Wulfram
Bellec, Guillaume
author_facet Barry, Martin
Gerstner, Wulfram
Bellec, Guillaume
contents "You never forget how to ride a bike", -- but how is that possible? The brain is able to learn complex skills, stop the practice for years, learn other skills in between, and still retrieve the original knowledge when necessary. The mechanisms of this capability, referred to as lifelong learning (or continual learning, CL), are unknown. We suggest a bio-plausible meta-plasticity rule building on classical work in CL which we summarize in two principles: (i) neurons are context selective, and (ii) a local availability variable partially freezes the plasticity if the neuron was relevant for previous tasks. In a new neuro-centric formalization of these principles, we suggest that neuron selectivity and neuron-wide consolidation is a simple and viable meta-plasticity hypothesis to enable CL in the brain. In simulation, this simple model balances forgetting and consolidation leading to better transfer learning than contemporary CL algorithms on image recognition and natural language processing CL benchmarks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2306_01690
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Context selectivity with dynamic availability enables lifelong continual learning
Barry, Martin
Gerstner, Wulfram
Bellec, Guillaume
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
"You never forget how to ride a bike", -- but how is that possible? The brain is able to learn complex skills, stop the practice for years, learn other skills in between, and still retrieve the original knowledge when necessary. The mechanisms of this capability, referred to as lifelong learning (or continual learning, CL), are unknown. We suggest a bio-plausible meta-plasticity rule building on classical work in CL which we summarize in two principles: (i) neurons are context selective, and (ii) a local availability variable partially freezes the plasticity if the neuron was relevant for previous tasks. In a new neuro-centric formalization of these principles, we suggest that neuron selectivity and neuron-wide consolidation is a simple and viable meta-plasticity hypothesis to enable CL in the brain. In simulation, this simple model balances forgetting and consolidation leading to better transfer learning than contemporary CL algorithms on image recognition and natural language processing CL benchmarks.
title Context selectivity with dynamic availability enables lifelong continual learning
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.01690