# Context selectivity with dynamic availability enables lifelong continual learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.01690 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01690/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 74 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jun 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Wide Residual Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.07146/) (2016)
- [Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08840/) (2017)
- [Progressive Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04671/) (2016)
- [Continual Lifelong Learning with Neural Networks: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07569/) (2018)
- [Continual Learning with Deep Generative Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.08690/) (2017)
- [An Empirical Investigation of Catastrophic Forgetting in Gradient-Based Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6211/) (2013)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting with hard attention to the task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01423/) (2018)
- [Orthogonal Gradient Descent for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.07104/) (2019)
- [Reinforced Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12369/) (2018)
- [BERT Post-Training for Review Reading Comprehension and Aspect-based Sentiment Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02232/) (2019)
- [Alleviating catastrophic forgetting using context-dependent gating and synaptic stabilization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.01569/) (2018)
- [Achieving Forgetting Prevention and Knowledge Transfer in Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.02706/) (2021)
- [Model Zoo: A Growing "Brain" That Learns Continually](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03027/) (2021)
- [Understanding Catastrophic Forgetting and Remembering in Continual Learning with Optimal Relevance Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.11343/) (2021)
- [Local plasticity rules can learn deep representations using self-supervised contrastive predictions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08262/) (2020)
- [Adapting BERT for Continual Learning of a Sequence of Aspect Sentiment Classification Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03271/) (2021)
- [Continual Reinforcement Learning with Complex Synapses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.07239/) (2018)
- [Avoiding Catastrophe: Active Dendrites Enable Multi-Task Learning in Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.00042/) (2021)
- [Constrained Predictive Coding as a Biologically Plausible Model of the Cortical Hierarchy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.15752/) (2022)
- [Continual Learning with Knowledge Transfer for Sentiment Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10021/) (2021)
- [Modelling continual learning in humans with Hebbian context gating and exponentially decaying task signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11560/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

"You never forget how to ride a bike", -- but how is that possible? The brain is able to learn complex skills, stop the practice for years, learn other skills in between, and still retrieve the original knowledge when necessary. The mechanisms of this capability, referred to as lifelong learning (or continual learning, CL), are unknown. We suggest a bio-plausible meta-plasticity rule building on classical work in CL which we summarize in two principles: (i) neurons are context selective, and (ii) a local availability variable partially freezes the plasticity if the neuron was relevant for previous tasks. In a new neuro-centric formalization of these principles, we suggest that neuron selectivity and neuron-wide consolidation is a simple and viable meta-plasticity hypothesis to enable CL in the brain. In simulation, this simple model balances forgetting and consolidation leading to better transfer learning than contemporary CL algorithms on image recognition and natural language processing CL benchmarks.