arXiv AI

Generative Replay for Equilibrium Propagation: Toward Edge-Friendly Continual Learning in Hopfield Networks

The paper introduces Energy-Based Generative Replay (EB-Gen) for Equilibrium Propagation (EqProp) trained Hopfield Networks, enabling continual learning without external data buffers or architectural overhead. EB-Gen leverages the network’s intrinsic generative dynamics to produce pseudo‑samples from a frozen copy of the model, allowing internal rehearsal. Experiments on split MNIST and split CIFAR‑10 show that EB-Gen improves stability and plasticity, achieving 75 % and 64 % average accuracy respectively, outperforming several baseline methods.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 18

Metaplasticity as adaptive gradient preconditioning for incremental learning

arXiv:2608. 14634v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Biological intelligence naturally prevents catastrophic forgetting through Complementary Learning Systems (CLS) theory, a macroscopic consolidation process driven at the local level by synaptic metaplasticity: the continuous, history-dependent neuromodulation of individual synapses.

By Isabelle Aguilar, Zayn Andre Zainal, Omid Kavehei
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Unsupervised Continual Learning with Growing Self-Organizing Maps and Synthetic Replay

The paper introduces a generative continual learning framework that uses growing self‑organizing maps (GSOMs) enhanced with learned distributional statistics and encoder‑decoder models for class‑incremental learning. GSOM units store mean, variance, and covariance estimates to synthesize replay samples, enabling exemplar‑free training without raw data or explicit task boundaries. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that the unsupervised method competes with supervised memory‑based approaches and outperforms memory‑free baselines, especially in single‑class incremental scenarios, and provides baseline results for TinyImageNet and MiniImageNet.

By Pujan Thapa, Alexander Ororbia, Travis Desell
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 28

Trust Region Continual Learning as an Implicit Meta-Learner

The paper introduces Trust Region Continual Learning, a hybrid approach that blends generative replay with a Fisher-metric trust region constraint to address catastrophic forgetting in sequential task learning. It demonstrates that, under local approximations, the update can be interpreted as a single-step Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) process, where replay provides an old-task gradient and the Fisher penalty shapes curvature. Experiments on task-incremental diffusion image generation and continual diffusion-policy control show that this method achieves superior final performance, better retention, and faster early-task recovery compared to EWC, replay, and other continual meta-learning baselines.

By Zekun Wang, Anant Gupta, Christopher J. MacLellan