Exploring Neuromodulation for Dynamic Learning

A continual learning system requires the ability to dynamically adapt and generalize to new tasks with access to only a few samples. In the central nervous system, across species, it is observed that continual and dynamic behavior in learning is an active result of a mechanism known as neuromodulation. Therefore, in this work, neuromodulatory plasticity is embedded with dynamic learning architectures as a first step toward realizing power and area efficient few shot learning systems. An inbuilt modulatory unit regulates learning based on the context and internal state of the system. This renders the system an ability to self modify its weights. In one of the proposed architectures, ModNet, a modulatory layer is introduced in a random projection framework. ModNet's learning capabilities are enhanced by integrating attention along with compartmentalized plasticity mechanisms. Moreover, to explore modulatory mechanisms in conjunction with backpropagation in deeper networks, a modulatory trace learning rule is introduced. The proposed learning rule, uses a time dependent trace to modify the synaptic connections as a function of ongoing states and activations. The trace itself is updated via simple plasticity rules thus reducing the demand on resources. The proposed ModNet and learning rules demonstrate the ability to learn from few samples, train quickly, and perform few-shot image classification in a computationally efficient manner. The simple ModNet and the compartmentalized ModNet architecture learn benchmark image classification tasks in just 2 epochs. The network with modulatory trace achieves an average accuracy of 98.8%±1.16 on the omniglot dataset for five-way one-shot image classification task while requiring 20x fewer trainable parameters in comparison to other state of the art models.