[ouid]

I'm not sure if you read the paper, because the analogy is not tenuous. It is a period of training where they require the model to be completely deprived of standard input, and fed noise instead, so that they can essentially flip the sign on the learning rule.

It is a simple, easy to state, hypothesis of what sleep is doing in organic brains, and you should note that there is an extreme paucity of those.

Perhaps the artifical brain referred to in the article is not the kind of artifical brain you're used to reasoning about, but the goal of these researchers is not to optimize their performance on ImageNet, it is to discover how the brain actually organizes itself. You should give it a read.