This paper proposes a biologically inspired incremental learning method for spatio-temporal patterns based on our recently
reported “Incremental learning through sleep (ILS)” method. This method alternately repeats two learning phases: awake and
sleep. During the awake phase, the system learns new spatio-temporal patterns by rote, whereas in the sleep phase, it rehearses
the recorded new memories interleaved with old memories. The rehearsal process is essential for reconstructing the internal
representation of the neural network so as not only to memorize the new patterns while keeping old memories but also to reduce
redundant hidden units. By using this strategy, the neural network achieves high generalization ability.
The most attractive property of the method is the incremental learning ability of non-independent distributed samples without
catastrophic forgetting despite using a small amount of resources. We applied our method to an experiment on robot control
signals, which vary depending on the context of the current situation.
Keywords incremental learning - spatio-temporal patterns - model selection - RBF