Few-shot Generation via Recalling Brain-Inspired Episodic-Semantic Memory

Zhibin Duan, Lv Zhiyi, Chaojie Wang, Bo Chen, Bo An, Mingyuan Zhou

Keywords: Generative Model, Memory-augmented Generative Model

Abstract:

Aimed at adapting a generative model to a novel generation task with only a few given data samples, the capability of few-shot generation is crucial for many real-world applications with limited data, \emph{e.g.}, artistic domains.
Instead of training from scratch, recent works tend to leverage the prior knowledge stored in previous datasets, which is quite similar to the memory mechanism of human intelligence, but few of these works directly imitate the memory-recall mechanism that humans make good use of in accomplishing creative tasks, \emph{e.g.}, painting and writing.
Inspired by the memory mechanism of human brain, in this work, we carefully design a variational structured memory module (VSM), which can simultaneously store both episodic and semantic memories to assist existing generative models efficiently recall these memories during sample generation.
Meanwhile, we introduce a bionic memory updating strategy for the conversion between episodic and semantic memories, which can also model the uncertainty during conversion.
Then, we combine the developed VSM with various generative models under the Bayesian framework, and evaluate these memory-augmented generative models with few-shot generation tasks, demonstrating the effectiveness of our methods.

Submission Number: 12216