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Related papers: Rethinking Plasticity in Deep Reinforcement Learni…

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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

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

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

This paper explores the connection between two recently identified phenomena in deep learning: plasticity loss and neural collapse. We analyze their correlation in different scenarios, revealing a significant association during the initial…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-04 Guglielmo Bonifazi , Iason Chalas , Gian Hess , Jakub Łucki

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

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

Loss of plasticity is a phenomenon in which neural networks lose their ability to learn from new experience. Despite being empirically observed in several problem settings, little is understood about the mechanisms that lead to loss of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Alex Lewandowski , Haruto Tanaka , Dale Schuurmans , Marlos C. Machado

Catastrophic forgetting affects the training of neural networks, limiting their ability to learn multiple tasks sequentially. From the perspective of the well established plasticity-stability dilemma, neural networks tend to be overly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-15 Seyed Iman Mirzadeh , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Razvan Pascanu , Hassan Ghasemzadeh

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

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

Deep neural networks have shown remarkable performance when trained on independent and identically distributed data from a fixed set of classes. However, in real-world scenarios, it can be desirable to train models on a continuous stream of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-09-04 Nicolas Michel , Giovanni Chierchia , Romain Negrel , Jean-François Bercher , Toshihiko Yamasaki

Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has had incredible achievements on high dimensional problems, yet its learning process remains unstable even on the simplest tasks. Deep RL uses neural networks as function approximators. These neural…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-18 Riccardo Della Vecchia , Alena Shilova , Philippe Preux , Riad Akrour

Despite the numerous advances, reinforcement learning remains away from widespread acceptance for autonomous controller design as compared to classical methods due to lack of ability to effectively tackle the reality gap. The reliance on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-09-23 Narendra Patwardhan , Zequn Wang

Deep neural networks have achieved impressive performance through carefully engineered training strategies. Nonetheless, such methods lack parallels in biological neural circuits, relying heavily on non-local credit assignment, precise…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-04-08 Navid Shervani-Tabar , Marzieh Alireza Mirhoseini , Robert Rosenbaum

When an online learning algorithm is used to estimate the unknown parameters of a model, the signals interacting with the parameter estimates should not decay too quickly for the optimal values to be discovered correctly. This requirement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-11-05 Kamil Nar , S. Shankar Sastry

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

A key challenge in lifelong reinforcement learning (RL) is the loss of plasticity, where previous learning progress hinders an agent's adaptation to new tasks. While regularization and resetting can help, they require precise hyperparameter…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-31 Aneesh Muppidi , Zhiyu Zhang , Heng Yang

In Reinforcement Learning (RL), enhancing sample efficiency is crucial, particularly in scenarios when data acquisition is costly and risky. In principle, off-policy RL algorithms can improve sample efficiency by allowing multiple updates…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-13 Hojoon Lee , Hanseul Cho , Hyunseung Kim , Daehoon Gwak , Joonkee Kim , Jaegul Choo , Se-Young Yun , Chulhee Yun

In a continual learning setting, we require a model to be plastic enough to learn a new task and stable enough to not disturb previously learned capabilities. We argue that this dilemma has an architectural root. A finite network has…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Karthik Charan Raghunathan , Christian Metzner , Laura Kriener , Melika Payvand

Machine unlearning seeks to remove the influence of particular data or class from trained models to meet privacy, legal, or ethical requirements. Existing unlearning methods tend to forget shallowly: phenomenon of an unlearned model pretend…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-23 Jaeheun Jung , Bosung Jung , Suhyun Bae , Donghun Lee