Continual Lifelong Learning Paper Review / Jeff Hawkins on Grid Cell Modules - February 10, 2021

Karan Grewal gives an overview of the paper “Continual Lifelong Learning with Neural Networks: A Review” by German Parisi, et al.. He first explains three main areas of current continual learning approaches. Then, he outlines four research areas that the authors advocate will be crucial to developing lifelong learning agents. In the second part, Jeff Hawkins discusses new ideas and improvements from our previous “Frameworks“ paper. He proposes a more refined grid cell module where each layer of minicolumns contains a 1D voltage-controlled oscillating module that represents movement in a particular direction. Jeff first explains the mechanisms within each column and how anchoring occurs in grid cell modules. He then gives an overview on displacement cells and deduces that if we have 1D grid cell modules, it is very likely that there are 1D displacement cell modules. Furthermore, he makes the case that the mechanisms for orientation cells are analogous to that of grid cells. He argues that each