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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 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

We identify a phenomenon, which we refer to as multi-model forgetting, that occurs when sequentially training multiple deep networks with partially-shared parameters; the performance of previously-trained models degrades as one optimizes a…

Deep learning models excel in stationary data but struggle in non-stationary environments due to a phenomenon known as loss of plasticity (LoP), the degradation of their ability to learn in the future. This work presents a first-principles…

Loss of plasticity in deep neural networks is the gradual reduction in a model's capacity to incrementally learn and has been identified as a key obstacle to learning in non-stationary problem settings. Recent work has shown that deep…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Seyed Roozbeh Razavi Rohani , Khashayar Khajavi , Wesley Chung , Mo Chen , Sharan Vaswani

Reinforcement learning research obtained significant success and attention with the utilization of deep neural networks to solve problems in high dimensional state or action spaces. While deep reinforcement learning policies are currently…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Ezgi Korkmaz

The ability to learn continually is essential in a complex and changing world. In this paper, we characterize the behavior of canonical value-based deep reinforcement learning (RL) approaches under varying degrees of non-stationarity. In…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-15 Zaheer Abbas , Rosie Zhao , Joseph Modayil , Adam White , Marlos C. Machado

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 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

Many failures in deep continual and reinforcement learning are associated with increasing magnitudes of the weights, making them hard to change and potentially causing overfitting. While many methods address these learning failures, they…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Mohamed Elsayed , Qingfeng Lan , Clare Lyle , A. Rupam Mahmood

How can we build agents that keep learning from experience, quickly and efficiently, after their initial training? Here we take inspiration from the main mechanism of learning in biological brains: synaptic plasticity, carefully tuned by…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2018-08-01 Thomas Miconi , Jeff Clune , Kenneth O. Stanley

Plasticity loss, a diminishing capacity to adapt as training progresses, is a critical challenge in deep reinforcement learning. We examine this issue in multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL), where higher representational flexibility is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Aleksandar Todorov , Juan Cardenas-Cartagena , Rafael F. Cunha , Marco Zullich , Matthia Sabatelli

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

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

Plasticity is a fundamental property of complex systems, such as the brain or an organism. Yet it typically remains a descriptive concept inferred retrospectively from observed outcomes, such as modifications in activity or morphology.…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2026-03-27 Igor Branchi

While reinforcement learning (RL) holds great potential for decision making in the real world, it suffers from a number of unique difficulties which often need specific consideration. In particular: it is highly non-stationary; suffers from…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-16 Alexander David Goldie , Chris Lu , Matthew Thomas Jackson , Shimon Whiteson , Jakob Nicolaus Foerster

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

Plasticity loss, a critical challenge in neural network training, limits a model's ability to adapt to new tasks or shifts in data distribution. This paper introduces AID (Activation by Interval-wise Dropout), a novel method inspired by…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Sangyeon Park , Isaac Han , Seungwon Oh , Kyung-Joong Kim

In continual learning, networks confront a trade-off between stability and plasticity when trained on a sequence of tasks. To bolster plasticity without sacrificing stability, we propose a novel training algorithm called LRFR. This approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-15 Zhenrong Liu , Yang Li , Yi Gong , Yik-Chung Wu

Developing reliable mechanisms for continuous local learning is a central challenge faced by biological and artificial systems. Yet, how the environmental factors and structural constraints on the learning network influence the optimal…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2024-03-21 Emmanouil Giannakakis , Sina Khajehabdollahi , Anna Levina