Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It is well known that when a connectionist network is trained on one set of patterns and then attempts to add new patterns to its repertoire, catastrophic interference may result. The use of sparse, orthogonal hidden-layer representations has been shown to reduce catastrophic interference. The author demonstrates that the use of sparse representations may, in certain cases, actually result in worse performance on catastrophic interference. This paper argues for the necessity of maintaining hidden-layer representations that are both as highly distributed and as highly orthogonal as possible. The author presents a learning algorithm, called context-biasing, that dynamically solves the problem of constraining hiddenlayer representations to simultaneously produce good orthogonality and distributedness. On the data tested for this study, context-biasing is shown to reduce catastrophic interference by more than 50% compared to standard backpropagation.