> Barak Pearlmutter has some work on how he thinks this is what happens in slow-wave sleep to make our brains less prone to seizures when we're awake.

Interesting! I am more familiar with Pearlmutter's work on automatic differentiation, but was was unaware of this work with Houghton.

A new hypothesis for sleep: tuning for criticality: https://zero.sci-hub.se/2153/6c1cfbc1b78d23ef2e1cb7102dd8339...

There is also a related paper on wake-sleep learning from UofT, of which I am sure you are aware:

The wake-sleep algorithm for unsupervised neural networks: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/ws.pdf

Are you aware of any recent work investigating the role of sleep in biological and statistical learning?