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Synaptic weight decay with selective consolidation enables fast learning without catastrophic forgetting

View ORCID ProfilePascal Leimer, View ORCID ProfileMichael Herzog, View ORCID ProfileWalter Senn
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/613265
Pascal Leimer
1Department of Physiology, University of Bern, Switzerland
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  • For correspondence: leimer@pyl.unibe.ch
Michael Herzog
2Brain Mind Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
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Walter Senn
1Department of Physiology, University of Bern, Switzerland
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Abstract

Learning can interfere with pre-existing memories that in classical neural networks may lead to catastrophic forgetting. Different from these networks, biological synapses show an early decay of long-term potentiation, combined with a tag & capture mechanism for selective consolidation. We present a 2-component synaptic plasticity model that, by an early decay and a tag & capture mechanism, enables context-dependent fast learning without catastrophic forgetting. For reinforcement learning in multiple contexts, the fast learning combined with an early weight decay maximizes the expected reward while minimizing interferences between subsequent contexts. Fast learning, enabled by a highly plastic weight component, improves performance for a given context. Between contexts this plastic component decays to prevent interference, but selective consolidation into a stable component protects old memories. As a downside of these mechanisms, learning is hampered when consolidation is triggered prematurely by interleaving easy and difficult tasks, consistent with human psychophysical experiments.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted April 22, 2019.
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Synaptic weight decay with selective consolidation enables fast learning without catastrophic forgetting
Pascal Leimer, Michael Herzog, Walter Senn
bioRxiv 613265; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/613265
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Synaptic weight decay with selective consolidation enables fast learning without catastrophic forgetting
Pascal Leimer, Michael Herzog, Walter Senn
bioRxiv 613265; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/613265

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