Multi-Scopic Cognitive Memory System for Continuous Gesture Learning

With the advancement of artificial intelligence technologies in recent years, research on intelligent robots has progressed. Robots are required to understand human intentions and communicate more smoothly with humans. Since gestures can have a variety of meanings, gesture recognition is one of the essential issues in communication between robots and humans. In addition, robots need to learn new gestures as humans grow. Moreover, individual gestures vary. Because catastrophic forgetting occurs in training new data in traditional gesture recognition approaches, it is necessary to preserve the prepared data and combine it with further data to train the model from scratch. We propose a Multi-scopic Cognitive Memory System (MCMS) that mimics the lifelong learning process of humans and can continuously learn new gestures without forgetting previously learned gestures. The proposed system comprises a two-layer structure consisting of an episode memory layer and a semantic memory layer, with a topological map as its backbone. The system is designed with reference to conventional continuous learning systems in three ways: (i) using a dynamic architecture without setting the network size, (ii) adding regularization terms to constrain learning, and (iii) generating data from the network itself and performing relearning. The episode memory layer clusters the data and learns their spatiotemporal representation. The semantic memory layer generates a topological map based on task-related inputs and stores them as longer-term episode representations in the robot’s memory. In addition, to alleviate catastrophic forgetting, the memory replay function can reinforce memories autonomously. The proposed system could mitigate catastrophic forgetting and perform continuous learning by using both machine learning benchmark datasets and real-world data compared to conventional methods.