From Open-ended Experience to Wisdom: where Memories in Brains and AIs Converge (Dr Chen Sun)

Dr Chen Sun from Google DeepMind presents his talk "From Open-ended Experience to Wisdom: where Memories in Brains and AIs Converge"

Humans exhibit a lifelong capacity for transforming experience into profound wisdom, a trajectory current AI systems have yet to achieve; bridging this gap is therefore a critical research frontier. This presentation explores key neuroscientific insights, such as how the brain abstracts experiences into discrete pointers that are generalizable, and employs mechanisms like awake hippocampal replay to 'tag' memories for sparse consolidation. The translation of these principles, particularly sparsity, offers significant benefits to AI, demonstrated in reinforcement learning through 'Contrastive Retrospection' (ConSpec), which rapidly identifies critical states to enhance learning and generalization. Next, we pivot to current learning in Large Language Models, revealing how they learn and forget, and how newly ingested data reshapes their existing knowledge landscape in ways that differ substantially from the brain when confronting similar continual learning challenges. Finally, we discuss how inspiration from the brain is able to substantially improve on-target continued learning in LLMs and reduce hallucinations. By incorporating principles of the brain for long term memory and continued learning, we aim to endow AIs with the capacity to transform their own journeys into genuine, evolving wisdom.

We'd like to thank our sponsors for this conference: XTX Markets, Google DeepMind, Context Fund, The Kavli Foundation, Wolfram Alpha, Artificial Intelligence Journal, and Gatsby

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