Artificial Neural Variability for Deep Learning: On Overfitting, Noise Memorization, and Catastrophic Forgetting
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Deep learning is often criticized by two serious issues which rarely exist in natural nervous systems: overfitting and catastrophic forgetting. It can even memorize randomly labelled data, which has little knowledge behind the instance-label pairs...
When a deep network continually learns over time by accommodating new tasks, it usually quickly overwrites the knowledge learned from previous tasks. Referred to as the neural variability, it is well-known in neuroscience that human brain reactions exhibit substantial variability even in response to the same stimulus. This mechanism balances accuracy and plasticity/flexibility in the motor learning of natural nervous systems.