The Importance of Forgetting for Both Humans & Machines • Robert Crowe • GOTO 2022

Here:

Forgetting helps us adapt to change

• Inhumans
  • Episodic memory responsible for remembering specific events, e.g., coming to a conference
  • Models of forgetting mimic brain’s method
  • Neuroscientists identify specific brain regions associated with forgetting:
    • Prefrontal cortex, involved in working memory
    • Amygdala, related to memory with emotions
    • Neocortex and hippocampus involved in neural pruning
    • Neurotransmitters, such as GABA, facilitating forgetting
• For machine learning (ML) models:
  • Forgetting aids adaptation to new data
  • Research suggests: “ignoring” irrelevant patterns and selecting for more significant ones

• To facilitate MLOps

It’s challenging to keep accuracy up when encountering new things or data sets.