Timezone: »
Unlike humans, who are capable of continual learning over their lifetimes, artificial neural networks have long been known to suffer from a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting, whereby new learning can lead to abrupt erasure of previously acquired knowledge. Whereas in a neural network the parameters are typically modelled as scalar values, an individual synapse in the brain comprises a complex network of interacting biochemical components that evolve at different timescales. In this paper, we show that by equipping tabular and deep reinforcement learning agents with a synaptic model that incorporates this biological complexity (Benna & Fusi, 2016), catastrophic forgetting can be mitigated at multiple timescales. In particular, we find that as well as enabling continual learning across sequential training of two simple tasks, it can also be used to overcome within-task forgetting by reducing the need for an experience replay database.
Author Information
Christos Kaplanis (Imperial College London)
PhD student investigating the topic of continual learning in artificial neural networks.
Murray Shanahan (Imperial College London)
Claudia Clopath (Imperial College London)
Related Events (a corresponding poster, oral, or spotlight)
-
2018 Oral: Continual Reinforcement Learning with Complex Synapses »
Wed. Jul 11th 03:50 -- 04:00 PM Room A3
More from the Same Authors
-
2022 Poster: Maslow's Hammer in Catastrophic Forgetting: Node Re-Use vs. Node Activation »
Sebastian Lee · Stefano Sarao Mannelli · Claudia Clopath · Sebastian Goldt · Andrew Saxe -
2022 Spotlight: Maslow's Hammer in Catastrophic Forgetting: Node Re-Use vs. Node Activation »
Sebastian Lee · Stefano Sarao Mannelli · Claudia Clopath · Sebastian Goldt · Andrew Saxe -
2021 Poster: Spectral Normalisation for Deep Reinforcement Learning: An Optimisation Perspective »
Florin Gogianu · Tudor Berariu · Mihaela Rosca · Claudia Clopath · Lucian Busoniu · Razvan Pascanu -
2021 Spotlight: Spectral Normalisation for Deep Reinforcement Learning: An Optimisation Perspective »
Florin Gogianu · Tudor Berariu · Mihaela Rosca · Claudia Clopath · Lucian Busoniu · Razvan Pascanu -
2020 : Invited Talk: Claudia Clopath "Continual learning though consolidation – a neuroscience angle" »
Claudia Clopath -
2019 Poster: Policy Consolidation for Continual Reinforcement Learning »
Christos Kaplanis · Murray Shanahan · Claudia Clopath -
2019 Oral: Policy Consolidation for Continual Reinforcement Learning »
Christos Kaplanis · Murray Shanahan · Claudia Clopath