English
Related papers

Related papers: Predicting Plasticity in Deep Continual Learning: …

200 papers

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

General results from statistical learning theory suggest to understand not only brain computations, but also brain plasticity as probabilistic inference. But a model for that has been missing. We propose that inherently stochastic features…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2016-02-17 David Kappel , Stefan Habenschuss , Robert Legenstein , Wolfgang Maass

Deep learning optimization exhibits structure that is not captured by worst-case gradient bounds. Empirically, gradients along training trajectories are often temporally predictable and evolve within a low-dimensional subspace. In this work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Anherutowa Calvo

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

Contrastive representation learning has emerged as a promising technique for continual learning as it can learn representations that are robust to catastrophic forgetting and generalize well to unseen future tasks. Previous work in…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2023-11-06 Rouzbeh Meshkinnejad , Jie Mei , Daniel Lizotte , Yalda Mohsenzadeh

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

Deep neural networks are powerful tools to detect hidden patterns in data and leverage them to make predictions, but they are not designed to understand uncertainty and estimate reliable probabilities. In particular, they tend to be…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-10 Bat-Sheva Einbinder , Yaniv Romano , Matteo Sesia , Yanfei Zhou

We propose a guided dropout regularizer for deep networks based on the evidence of a network prediction defined as the firing of neurons in specific paths. In this work, we utilize the evidence at each neuron to determine the probability of…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-01-22 Andrea Zunino , Sarah Adel Bargal , Pietro Morerio , Jianming Zhang , Stan Sclaroff , Vittorio Murino

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

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 where neural networks can become more difficult to train over the course of learning. Continual learning algorithms seek to mitigate this effect by sustaining good performance while maintaining network…

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

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…

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

In continual learning, plasticity refers to the ability of an agent to quickly adapt to new information. Neural networks are known to lose plasticity when processing non-stationary data streams. In this paper, we propose L2 Init, a simple…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Saurabh Kumar , Henrik Marklund , Benjamin Van Roy

Standard deep-learning pipelines usually choose the network architecture before training and keep it fixed throughout optimization. In contrast, a model can also be adapted by editing its structure during training, for example by pruning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-18 Lute Lillo , Nick Cheney

The impressive lifelong learning in animal brains is primarily enabled by plastic changes in synaptic connectivity. Importantly, these changes are not passive, but are actively controlled by neuromodulation, which is itself under the…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-07-06 Thomas Miconi , Aditya Rawal , Jeff Clune , Kenneth O. Stanley

While deep neural networks have surpassed human performance in multiple situations, they are prone to catastrophic forgetting: upon training a new task, they rapidly forget previously learned ones. Neuroscience studies, based on idealized…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-03-24 Axel Laborieux , Maxence Ernoult , Tifenn Hirtzlin , Damien Querlioz

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

Regression methods are fundamental for scientific and technological applications. However, fitted models can be highly unreliable outside of their training domain, and hence the quantification of their uncertainty is crucial in many of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2024-03-05 Filippo Bigi , Sanggyu Chong , Michele Ceriotti , Federico Grasselli