METACOGNITIVE REGIME-SWITCHED SPIKING NEURAL NETWORK WITH CONTRASTIVE MEMORY CONSOLIDATION

Continual learning in Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) remains a significant challenge due to the plasticity-stability dilemma, often leading to catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we propose a novel computational architecture titled Metacognitive Regime-Switched SNN (MRS-SNN), which integrates a metacognitive control mechanism into a Complementary Learning Systems framework. The core of our architecture is the Regime-Switching Markov (RMS) controller, acting as a metacognitive agent [8] that monitors prediction errors in real-time to modulate gating signals. This allows the system to autonomously switch between a "Plasticity" mode (upon novelty detection) and a "Stability" mode (for familiar data). To address the cold-start problem and weight saturation inherent in noisy neuromorphic data, we introduce a Contrastive Memory Consolidation learning rule. This rule combines Gated Trace Learning with Subtractive Normalization, enabling sharp, one-shot feature extraction. Experimental validation on the N-MNIST dataset confirms that MRS-SNN maintains superior reliability across sequential tasks, with accuracy metrics reaching 83% for old tasks and 99% for new tasks (Global Avg: ~93%). Furthermore, through a simulated Wake-Sleep cycle, the system successfully consolidates memories from a short-term store (artificial Hippocampus) to a long-term store (artificial Neocortex), offering a promising solution for self-adaptive Edge AI systems.