Facebook teaches AI systems to forget irrelevant information

Unlike human memory, most neural networks typically process information indiscriminately. On a small scale, this is functional. But current AI mechanisms used to selectively focus on certain parts of their input struggle with ever-larger quantities of information, incurring unsustainable computational costs. For this reason, Facebook researchers want to help future AIs to pay more attention to important data by assigning an expiration date. They announced the development of a novel method in deep learning, called Expire-Span, a first-of-its-kind operation that equips neural networks with the ability to forget at scale.