Cited by 474Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot LearningNeural Networks and ApplicationsMemory Processes and Influences

Brain-inspired replay for continual learning with artificial neural networks

Open access
van de Ven, Gido M., Siegelmann, Hava T., Tolias, Andreas S.·2020·Nature Communications

Abstract

Artificial neural networks suffer from catastrophic forgetting. Unlike humans, when these networks are trained on something new, they rapidly forget what was learned before. In the brain, a mechanism thought to be important for protecting memories is the reactivation of neuronal activity patterns representing those memories. In artificial neural networks, such memory replay can be implemented as 'generative replay', which can successfully - and surprisingly efficiently - prevent catastrophic forgetting on toy examples even in a class-incremental learning scenario. However, scaling up generative replay to complicated problems with many tasks or complex inputs is challenging. We propose a new, brain-inspired variant of replay in which internal or hidden representations are replayed that are generated by the network's own, context-modulated feedback connections. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on challenging continual learning benchmarks (e.g., class-incremental learning on CIFAR-100) without storing data, and it provides a novel model for replay in the brain.

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  • In most cases where generative models are used, the generative model exists outside the network itself, which is not biologically realistic for the brain, although there are some exceptions.

    “It should be noted that in most these cases the generative model exists outside the network itself, which is not biologically realistic in the case of the brain, although there are some exceptions.150”

    From The overfitted brain: Dreams evolved to assist generalization (2021) · cites this paper as [150]

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  1. [36]Goodfellow, I. et al. Generative adversarial nets. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (eds. Ghahramani, Z., Welling, M., Cortes, C., Lawrence, N. D. & Weinberger, K. Q.) 2672–2680 (Curran Associates, Inc., Montreal, 2014).
  2. [38]Rezende, D. J. & Mohamed, S. Variational inference with normalizing flows. In International Conference on Machine Learning (eds. Bach, F. R. and Blei, D. M.) 1530–1538 (JMLR.org, Lille, 2015).
  3. [53]Sajjadi, M. S., Bachem, O., Lucic, M., Bousquet, O. & Gelly, S. Assessing generative models via precision and recall. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (eds. Bengio, S., Wallach, H., Larochelle, H., Grauman, K., Cesa-Bianchi, N. & Garnett, R.) 5228–5237 (Curran Associates, Inc., Montreal, 2018).

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Authors
van de Ven, G. M., Siegelmann, H. T., & Tolias, A. S.
Affiliations
  • University of Massachusetts Amherst (US)
  • Baylor College of Medicine (US)
Venue
Nature Communications
Published
2020-08-13
Volume
11
Issue
1
Pages
4069-4069
ISSN
2041-1723 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3048941751
Cited by
474
References
79
Citations by year
2026: 53 · 2025: 96 · 2024: 98 · 2023: 102 · 2022: 74 · 2021: 46 · 2020: 5
FWCI
22.31
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Nature Communications (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • Lirias (KU Leuven) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • Apollo (University of Cambridge) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • Apollo (cc-by)
  • Apollo
Funders
  • International Brain Research Organization
  • United States Department of Defense | Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (HR0011-18-2-0025)
  • ODNI | Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (D16PC00003)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Neural Networks and Applications
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory Processes and Influences
Keywords
continual learning, catastrophic forgetting, memory replay, generative replay, brain-inspired learning, class-incremental learning, feedback connections, memory reactivation

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