Related papers: Rethinking Plasticity in Deep Reinforcement Learni…
Deep continual learning requires models to adapt to new tasks without retraining from scratch. However, neural networks can lose their ability to adapt to new tasks after training on previous ones, a phenomenon known as loss of plasticity.…
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…
Plasticity, the ability of a neural network to quickly change its predictions in response to new information, is essential for the adaptability and robustness of deep reinforcement learning systems. Deep neural networks are known to lose…
Underpinning the past decades of work on the design, initialization, and optimization of neural networks is a seemingly innocuous assumption: that the network is trained on a \textit{stationary} data distribution. In settings where this…
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…
Plasticity refers to a network's ability to adapt to changing data distributions, which is crucial for the successful training of deep reinforcement learning agents. Loss of plasticity causes performance plateaus and contributes to scaling…
Continual learning with deep neural networks presents challenges distinct from both the fixed-dataset and convex continual learning regimes. One such challenge is plasticity loss, wherein a neural network trained in an online fashion…
In recent years, continual learning, a prediction setting in which the problem environment may evolve over time, has become an increasingly popular research field due to the framework's gearing towards complex, non-stationary objectives.…
Neural plasticity is an important functionality of human brain, in which number of neurons and synapses can shrink or expand in response to stimuli throughout the span of life. We model this dynamic learning process as an $L_0$-norm…
In contrast to the human ability to continuously acquire knowledge, agents struggle with the stability-plasticity dilemma in deep reinforcement learning (DRL), which refers to the trade-off between retaining existing skills (stability) and…
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…
Continual learning has become a trending topic in machine learning. Recent studies have discovered an interesting phenomenon called loss of plasticity, referring to neural networks gradually losing the ability to learn new tasks. However,…
Plasticity, or the ability of an agent to adapt to new tasks, environments, or distributions, is crucial for continual learning. In this paper, we study the loss of plasticity in deep continual RL from the lens of churn: network output…
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…
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…
Modern deep-learning systems are specialized to problem settings in which training occurs once and then never again, as opposed to continual-learning settings in which training occurs continually. If deep-learning systems are applied in a…
Loss of plasticity is one of the main challenges in continual learning with deep neural networks, where neural networks trained via backpropagation gradually lose their ability to adapt to new tasks and perform significantly worse than…
Continual learning algorithms strive to acquire new knowledge while preserving prior information. Often, these algorithms emphasise stability and restrict network updates upon learning new tasks. In many cases, such restrictions come at a…
Recent analyses of certain gradient descent optimization methods have shown that performance can degrade in some settings - such as with stochasticity or implicit momentum. In deep reinforcement learning (Deep RL), such optimization methods…
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…