Kioxia Corporation, the world leader in memory solutions, has developed an image classification system based on Memory-Centric AI, an AI technology that utilizes high-capacity storage. The system classifies images using a neural network that refers to knowledge stored in external high-capacity storage; this avoids "catastrophic forgetting," one of the major challenges of neural networks, and allows knowledge to be added or updated without the loss of current knowledge. This technology was presented on October 25 at the oral session of European Conference on Computer Vision 2022 (ECCV 2022) in Tel Aviv, one of the top conferences in the field of computer vision.

In conventional AI techniques, neural networks are trained to acquire knowledge by updating parameters called "weights." Once fully trained, in order to acquire new knowledge a neural network must be either re-trained from the beginning or fine-tuned with new data. The former requires huge amounts of time and consumes significant energy costs, while the latter requires parameters to be updated and faces the catastrophic forgetting problem of losing the knowledge acquired in the past which leads to deterioration of classification accuracy.