Bayesian continual learning and forgetting in neural networks

Biological synapses effortlessly balance memory retention and flexibility, yet artificial neural networks still struggle with the extremes of catastrophic forgetting and catastrophic remembering. Here, we introduce Metaplasticity from Synaptic Uncertainty (MESU), a Bayesian framework that updates network parameters according their uncertainty. This approach allows a principled combination of learning and forgetting that ensures that critical knowledge is preserved while unused or outdated information is gradually released. Unlike standard Bayesian approaches -- which risk becoming overly constrained, and popular continual-learning methods that rely on explicit task boundaries, MESU seamlessly adapts to streaming data. It further provides reliable epistemic uncertainty estimates, allowing out-of-distribution detection, the only computational cost being to sample the weights multiple times to provide proper output statistics. Experiments on image-classification benchmarks demonstrate that MESU mitigates catastrophic forgetting, while maintaining plasticity for new tasks. When training 200 sequential permuted MNIST tasks, MESU outperforms established continual learning techniques in terms of accuracy, capability to learn additional tasks, and out-of-distribution data detection. Additionally, due to its non-reliance on task boundaries, MESU outperforms conventional learning techniques on the incremental training of CIFAR-100 tasks consistently in a wide range of scenarios. Our results unify ideas from metaplasticity, Bayesian inference, and Hessian-based regularization, offering a biologically-inspired pathway to robust, perpetual learning.

Hardware-Accelerated Event-Graph Neural Networks for Low-Latency Time-Series Classification on SoC FPGA

As the quantities of data recorded by embedded edge sensors grow, so too does the need for intelligent local processing. Such data often comes in the form of time-series signals, based on which real-time predictions can be made locally using an AI model. However, a hardware-software approach capable of making low-latency predictions with low power consumption is required. In this paper, we present a hardware implementation of an event-graph neural network for time-series classification. We leverage an artificial cochlea model to convert the input time-series signals into a sparse event-data format that allows the event-graph to drastically reduce the number of calculations relative to other AI methods. We implemented the design on a SoC FPGA and applied it to the real-time processing of the Spiking Heidelberg Digits (SHD) dataset to benchmark our approach against competitive solutions. Our method achieves a floating-point accuracy of 92.7% on the SHD dataset for the base model, which is only 2.4% and 2% less than the state-of-the-art models with over 10% and 67% fewer model parameters, respectively. It also outperforms FPGA-based spiking neural network implementations by 19.3% and 4.5%, achieving 92.3% accuracy for the quantised model while using fewer computational resources and reducing latency.

Bayesian Metaplasticity from Synaptic Uncertainty

Catastrophic forgetting remains a challenge for neural networks, especially in lifelong learning scenarios. In this study, we introduce MEtaplasticity from Synaptic Uncertainty (MESU), inspired by metaplasticity and Bayesian inference principles. MESU harnesses synaptic uncertainty to retain information over time, with its update rule closely approximating the diagonal Newton's method for synaptic updates. Through continual learning experiments on permuted MNIST tasks, we demonstrate MESU's remarkable capability to maintain learning performance across 100 tasks without the need of explicit task boundaries.