Memories can be as tricky to hold onto for machines as they can be for humans. To help understand why artificial agents develop holes in their own cognitive processes, electrical engineers at The Ohio State University have analyzed how much a process called “continual learning” impacts their overall performance.

Continual learning is when a computer is trained to continuously learn a sequence of tasks, using its accumulated knowledge from old tasks to better learn new tasks.

Yet one major hurdle scientists still need to overcome to achieve such heights is learning how to circumvent the machine learning equivalent of memory loss—a process which in AI agents is known as “catastrophic forgetting.” As artificial neural networks are trained on one new task after another, they tend to lose the information gained from those previous tasks, an issue that could become problematic as society comes to rely on AI systems more and more, said Ness Shroff, an Ohio Eminent Scholar and professor of computer science and engineering at The Ohio State University.