Active Dendrites

The following content is mainly about the article Avoiding Catastrophe: Active Dendrites Enable Multi-Tasking Learning in Dynamic Environments by A. Iyer et al. (December 2021). It is a pleasant paper mixing biology, neuroscience and mathematical modeling, I hope you find it interesting. Standard Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), based on the (inaccurate) point neuron model [Lapique, 1907] and backpropagation algorithm, often fail dramatically in multiple task learning. Differently from single-task machine learning, learning multiple distinct tasks introduces new complications. When using gradient-based methods (such as backpropagation), a noteworthy issue is that error gradients and accumulated knowledge from different tasks can interfere with one another.