Logo design by Maximilian Ororbia.

The Neural Adaptive Computing Laboratory (NAC Lab)

Computer Science, RIT

Members:

Director:
Dr. Alexander G. Ororbia II (Assistant Professor, Computer Science)

Researchers:
Previous Members

Neurocognitively-Inspired Lifelong Machine Learning

Neural architectures trained with back-propagation of errors are susceptible to catastrophic forgetting. In other words, old information acquired by these models is lost when new information for new tasks is acquired. This makes building models that continually learn extremely difficult if not near impossible. The focus of the NAC group's research is to draw from models of cognition and biological neurocircuitry, as well as theories of mind and brain functionality, to construct new learning procedures and architectures that generalize across tasks and continually adapt to novel situations, combining input from multiple modalities/sensory channels.

The NAC team is focused with developing novel, neurocognitively-inspired learning algorithms and memory architectures for artificial neural systems (for both non-spiking and spiking neurons). Furthermore, we explore and develop nature-inspired metaheuristic optimization algorithms, ranging from (neuro-)evolution to ant colony optimization to hybrid procedures. We primarily are concerned with the various sub-problems associated with lifelong machine learning, which subsumes online/stream learning, transfer learning, multi-task learning, multi-modal/input learning, and semi-supervised learning.

Lifelong Machine Learning Publications

Spiking Neural Network and Brain-Inspired Computing Publications

Active Inference, Brain-Motivated Reinforcement Learning, Cognitive Architecture Publications

Predictive Coding / Predictive Processing Publications

Neurocognitive Learning Algorithm and Architecture Publications

Metaheuristic Optimization Publications