Deep Generative Dual Memory Network for Continual Learning

Nitin Kamra, Umang Gupta, Yan Liu

Abstract: Despite advances in deep learning, artificial neural networks do not learn the same way as humans do. Today, neural networks can learn multiple tasks when trained on them jointly, but cannot maintain performance on learnt tasks when tasks are presented one at a time -- this phenomenon called catastrophic forgetting is a fundamental challenge to overcome before neural networks can learn continually from incoming data. In this work, we derive inspiration from human memory to develop an architecture capable of learning continuously from sequentially incoming tasks, while averting catastrophic forgetting. Specifically, our model consists of a dual memory architecture to emulate the complementary learning systems (hippocampus and the neocortex) in the human brain and maintains a consolidated long-term memory via generative replay of past experiences. We (i) substantiate our claim that replay should be generative, (ii) show the benefits of generative replay and dual memory via experiments, and (iii) demonstrate improved performance retention even for small models with low capacity. Our architecture displays many important characteristics of the human memory and provides insights on the connection between sleep and learning in humans.

TL;DR: A dual memory architecture inspired from human brain to learn sequentially incoming tasks, while averting catastrophic forgetting.

Keywords: Continual Learning, Catastrophic Forgetting, Sequential Multitask Learning, Deep Generative Models, Dual Memory Networks, Deep Learning

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:1710.10368/code)