Self-recovery of memory via generative replay

Abstract: A remarkable capacity of the brain is its ability to autonomously reorganize memories during offline periods. Memory replay, a mechanism hypothesized to underlie biological offline learning, has inspired offline methods for reducing forgetting in artificial neural networks in continual learning settings. A memory-efficient and neurally-plausible method is generative replay, which achieves state of the art performance on continual learning benchmarks. However, unlike the brain, standard generative replay does not self-reorganize memories when trained offline on its own replay samples. We propose a novel architecture that augments generative replay with an adaptive, brain-like capacity to autonomously recover memories. We demonstrate this capacity of the architecture across several continual learning tasks and environments.