Continual Learning Working Group

Weekly Meeting Group Discussion: Saket Navlakha, Associate Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Labs (Available via Zoom)

Saket Navlakha, Associate Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Labs, will present his work, “Reducing Catastrophic Forgetting With Associative Learning: A Lesson From Fruit Flies“. In this work, the authors identified a two-layer neural circuit in the fruit fly olfactory system that performs continual associative learning between odors and their associated valences. In the first layer, inputs (odors) are encoded using sparse, high-dimensional representations, which reduces memory interference by activating nonoverlapping populations of neurons for different odors. In the second layer, only the synapses between odor-activated neurons and the odor’s associated output neuron are modified during learning; the rest of the weights are frozen to prevent unrelated memories from being overwritten. The takeaway is that fruit flies evolved an efficient continual associative learning algorithm, and circuit mechanisms from neuroscience can be translated to improve machine computation.

Zoom: https://columbiauniversity.zoom.us/j/94783759415?pwd=cTlDTDdCVk9vdEV0QzRKL0hKQW1Kdz09