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Related papers: Understanding plasticity in neural networks

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Developing lifelong learning agents is crucial for artificial general intelligence (AGI). However, deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems often suffer from plasticity loss, where neural networks gradually lose their ability to adapt…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Mingqi Yuan , Qi Wang , Guozheng Ma , Caihao Sun , Bo Li , Xin Jin , Yunbo Wang , Xiaokang Yang , Wenjun Zeng , Dacheng Tao , Jiayu Chen

The process of training an artificial neural network involves iteratively adapting its parameters so as to minimize the error of the network's prediction, when confronted with a learning task. This iterative change can be naturally…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-10 Kaloyan Danovski , Miguel C. Soriano , Lucas Lacasa

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) rely on inherent fluctuations in their internal parameters (weights and biases) to effectively navigate the complex optimization landscape and achieve robust performance. While these fluctuations are recognized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-14 Darsh Pareek , Umesh Kumar , Ruthu Rao , Ravi Janjam

Existing methods for estimating uncertainty in deep learning tend to require multiple forward passes, making them unsuitable for applications where computational resources are limited. To solve this, we perform probabilistic reasoning over…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2020-12-08 Javier Antorán , James Urquhart Allingham , José Miguel Hernández-Lobato

We investigate why deep neural networks suffer from loss of plasticity in deep continual learning, failing to learn new tasks without reinitializing parameters. We show that this failure is preceded by Hessian spectral collapse at new-task…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Naicheng He , Kaicheng Guo , Arjun Prakash , Saket Tiwari , Ruo Yu Tao , Tyrone Serapio , Amy Greenwald , George Konidaris

Plasticity, the ability of a neural network to evolve with new data, is crucial for high-performance and sample-efficient visual reinforcement learning (VRL). Although methods like resetting and regularization can potentially mitigate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Guozheng Ma , Lu Li , Sen Zhang , Zixuan Liu , Zhen Wang , Yixin Chen , Li Shen , Xueqian Wang , Dacheng Tao

The highly non-linear nature of deep neural networks causes them to be susceptible to adversarial examples and have unstable gradients which hinders interpretability. However, existing methods to solve these issues, such as adversarial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-01-11 Suraj Srinivas , Kyle Matoba , Himabindu Lakkaraju , Francois Fleuret

Deep neural policies have recently been installed in a diverse range of settings, from biotechnology to automated financial systems. However, the utilization of deep neural networks to approximate the value function leads to concerns on the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-26 Ezgi Korkmaz

There are many surprising and perhaps counter-intuitive properties of optimization of deep neural networks. We propose and experimentally verify a unified phenomenological model of the loss landscape that incorporates many of them. High…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Stanislav Fort , Stanislaw Jastrzebski

Studying the sensitivity of weight perturbation in neural networks and its impacts on model performance, including generalization and robustness, is an active research topic due to its implications on a wide range of machine learning tasks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-20 Yu-Lin Tsai , Chia-Yi Hsu , Chia-Mu Yu , Pin-Yu Chen

Plasticity Loss is an increasingly important phenomenon that refers to the empirical observation that as a neural network is continually trained on a sequence of changing tasks, its ability to adapt to a new task diminishes over time. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Vivek F. Farias , Adam D. Jozefiak

As deep neural networks grow in size, from thousands to millions to billions of weights, the performance of those networks becomes limited by our ability to accurately train them. A common naive question arises: if we have a system with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-05-29 Nathan O. Hodas , Panos Stinis

The adaptive learning capabilities seen in biological neural networks are largely a product of the self-modifying behavior emerging from online plastic changes in synaptic connectivity. Current methods in Reinforcement Learning (RL) only…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2020-06-16 Samuel Schmidgall

Deep artificial neural networks famously struggle to learn from non-stationary streams of data. Without dedicated mitigation strategies, continual learning is associated with continuous forgetting of previous tasks and a progressive loss of…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-12-29 Suzanne van der Veldt , Gido M. van de Ven , Sanne Moorman , Guillaume Etter

Randomized Neural Networks explore the behavior of neural systems where the majority of connections are fixed, either in a stochastic or a deterministic fashion. Typical examples of such systems consist of multi-layered neural network…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-03 Claudio Gallicchio , Simone Scardapane

Catastrophic forgetting is a major problem in continual learning, and lots of approaches arise to reduce it. However, most of them are evaluated through task accuracy, which ignores the internal model structure. Recent research suggests…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Yunqin Zhu , Jun Jin

Representation learning, i.e. the generation of representations useful for downstream applications, is a task of fundamental importance that underlies much of the success of deep neural networks (DNNs). Recently, robustness to adversarial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-16 Christian Cianfarani , Arjun Nitin Bhagoji , Vikash Sehwag , Ben Y. Zhao , Prateek Mittal , Haitao Zheng

Effectively scaling up deep reinforcement learning models has proven notoriously difficult due to network pathologies during training, motivating various targeted interventions such as periodic reset and architectural advances such as layer…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Guozheng Ma , Lu Li , Zilin Wang , Li Shen , Pierre-Luc Bacon , Dacheng Tao

The loss of plasticity in learning agents, analogous to the solidification of neural pathways in biological brains, significantly impedes learning and adaptation in reinforcement learning due to its non-stationary nature. To address this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Jiashun Liu , Johan Obando-Ceron , Aaron Courville , Ling Pan

Artificial neural networks have shown remarkable success in supervised learning when trained on a single task using a fixed dataset. However, when neural networks are trained on a reinforcement learning task, their ability to continue…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Mansi Maheshwari , John C. Raisbeck , Bruno Castro da Silva