Epistemic status: random thought I just had, but what if there kind of is. I think maybe dreaming is the “test” part of the training cycle: the newly updated weights run against outcome predictions supplied by parts of the system not currently being updated. The being-updated part tries to get desirable outcomes within the dream, and another network / region plays Dungeon Master, supplying scenario and outcomes for given actions. Test against synthetic test data, supplied by a partially adversarial network.
I feel like, if true, we’d expect to see some kind of failures to learn-from-sleep in habitual lucid dreamers? Or reduced efficacy, anyway? I wonder what happens in a learning setup which is using test performance to make meta training decisions, if you hack the test results to erroneously report greater-than-actual performance…? Are there people who do not dream at all (as distinguished from merely not remembering dreams)?
This model of “what even is a dream, anyway?” makes a lot more predictions/retrodictions than my old model of “dreams are just the qualia of neuronal sub populations coming back online as one wakes up”.
Re: no human training/test separation:
Epistemic status: random thought I just had, but what if there kind of is. I think maybe dreaming is the “test” part of the training cycle: the newly updated weights run against outcome predictions supplied by parts of the system not currently being updated. The being-updated part tries to get desirable outcomes within the dream, and another network / region plays Dungeon Master, supplying scenario and outcomes for given actions. Test against synthetic test data, supplied by a partially adversarial network.
I feel like, if true, we’d expect to see some kind of failures to learn-from-sleep in habitual lucid dreamers? Or reduced efficacy, anyway? I wonder what happens in a learning setup which is using test performance to make meta training decisions, if you hack the test results to erroneously report greater-than-actual performance…? Are there people who do not dream at all (as distinguished from merely not remembering dreams)?
This model of “what even is a dream, anyway?” makes a lot more predictions/retrodictions than my old model of “dreams are just the qualia of neuronal sub populations coming back online as one wakes up”.