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Related papers: Neural Network Plasticity and Loss Sharpness

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While the traditional formulation of machine learning tasks is in terms of performance on average, in practice we are often interested in how well a trained model performs on rare or difficult data points at test time. To achieve more…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-29 Matthew J. Holland , Toma Hamada

Reducing network complexity has been a major research focus in recent years with the advent of mobile technology. Convolutional Neural Networks that perform various vision tasks without memory overhaul is the need of the hour. This paper…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-30 Mayank Sharma , Suraj Tripathi , Abhimanyu Dubey , Jayadeva , Sai Guruju , Nihal Goalla

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

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

This paper examines the impact of static sparsity on the robustness of a trained network to weight perturbations, data corruption, and adversarial examples. We show that, up to a certain sparsity achieved by increasing network width and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-06-23 Lukas Timpl , Rahim Entezari , Hanie Sedghi , Behnam Neyshabur , Olga Saukh

Neural networks (NNs) are known to exhibit simplicity bias where they tend to prefer learning 'simple' features over more 'complex' ones, even when the latter may be more informative. Simplicity bias can lead to the model making biased…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-11 Bhavya Vasudeva , Kameron Shahabi , Vatsal Sharan

Despite extensive studies, the underlying reason as to why overparameterized neural networks can generalize remains elusive. Existing theory shows that common stochastic optimizers prefer flatter minimizers of the training loss, and thus a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-25 Kaiyue Wen , Zhiyuan Li , Tengyu Ma

Various natural language processing tasks are structured prediction problems where outputs are constructed with multiple interdependent decisions. Past work has shown that domain knowledge, framed as constraints over the output space, can…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-06-03 Xingyuan Pan , Maitrey Mehta , Vivek Srikumar

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

Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has been receiving increasingly more attention thanks to its encouraging performance on a variety of control tasks. Yet, conventional regularization techniques in training neural networks (e.g., $L_2$…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-11-30 Zhuang Liu , Xuanlin Li , Bingyi Kang , Trevor Darrell

Regularization has long been utilized to learn sparsity in deep neural network pruning. However, its role is mainly explored in the small penalty strength regime. In this work, we extend its application to a new scenario where the…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-04-07 Huan Wang , Can Qin , Yulun Zhang , Yun Fu

Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs) have proven successful in learning dynamical systems in terms of accurately recovering the observed trajectories. While different types of sparsity have been proposed to improve robustness, the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-27 Hananeh Aliee , Till Richter , Mikhail Solonin , Ignacio Ibarra , Fabian Theis , Niki Kilbertus

Existing generalization measures that aim to capture a model's simplicity based on parameter counts or norms fail to explain generalization in overparameterized deep neural networks. In this paper, we introduce a new, theoretically…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-11 Lorenz Kuhn , Clare Lyle , Aidan N. Gomez , Jonas Rothfuss , Yarin Gal

A growing body of evidence suggests that neural networks employed in deep reinforcement learning (RL) gradually lose their plasticity, the ability to learn from new data; however, the analysis and mitigation of this phenomenon is hampered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-05 Evgenii Nikishin , Junhyuk Oh , Georg Ostrovski , Clare Lyle , Razvan Pascanu , Will Dabney , André Barreto

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

Deep neural networks can struggle to learn continually in the face of non-stationarity. This phenomenon is known as loss of plasticity. In this paper, we identify underlying principles that lead to plastic algorithms. In particular, we…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-29 Alex Lewandowski , Dale Schuurmans , Marlos C. Machado

Neural networks have attracted a lot of attention due to its success in applications such as natural language processing and computer vision. For large scale data, due to the tremendous number of parameters in neural networks, overfitting…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-07-05 Xiaoxi Shen , Jinghang Lin

Flat minima are strongly associated with improved generalisation in deep neural networks. However, this connection has proven nuanced in recent studies, with both theoretical counterexamples and empirical exceptions emerging in the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-16 Israel Mason-Williams , Gabryel Mason-Williams , Helen Yannakoudakis

Sparse neural networks are highly desirable in deep learning in reducing its complexity. The goal of this paper is to study how choices of regularization parameters influence the sparsity level of learned neural networks. We first derive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-07 Lixin Shen , Rui Wang , Yuesheng Xu , Mingsong Yan

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from plasticity loss severely due to the nature of non-stationarity, which impairs the ability to adapt to new data and learn continually. Unfortunately, our understanding of how plasticity loss…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-03 Zihao Wu , Hongyao Tang , Yi Ma , Jiashun Liu , Yan Zheng , Jianye Hao