  Continual learning aims to empower artificial intelligence (AI) with strong
adaptability to the real world. For this purpose, a desirable solution should
properly balance memory stability with learning plasticity, and acquire
sufficient compatibility to capture the observed distributions. Existing
advances mainly focus on preserving memory stability to overcome catastrophic
forgetting, but remain difficult to flexibly accommodate incremental changes as
biological intelligence (BI) does. By modeling a robust Drosophila learning
system that actively regulates forgetting with multiple learning modules, here
we propose a generic approach that appropriately attenuates old memories in
parameter distributions to improve learning plasticity, and accordingly
coordinates a multi-learner architecture to ensure solution compatibility.
Through extensive theoretical and empirical validation, our approach not only
clearly enhances the performance of continual learning, especially over
synaptic regularization methods in task-incremental settings, but also
potentially advances the understanding of neurological adaptive mechanisms,
serving as a novel paradigm to progress AI and BI together.
