arXiv Machine Learning

Self-Motivated Growing Neural Network for Adaptive Architecture via Local Structural Plasticity

arXiv:2512. 12713v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Control policies are often implemented with fixed-capacity multilayer perceptrons trained by backpropagation, which require architecture selection in advance and cannot adapt their capacity during learning.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 24

Stagnant Neuron: Towards Understanding the Plasticity Loss in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Value Factorization Methods

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) value factorization methods can suffer from a loss of plasticity, gradually failing to adapt when transferring to new task instances. We trace this issue to stagnant neurons, units whose gradient updates become negligibly small relative to their weights, thereby hindering learning.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

Stagnant Neuron: Towards Understanding the Plasticity Loss in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Value Factorization Methods

arXiv:2606. 25335v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) value factorization methods can suffer from a loss of plasticity, gradually failing to adapt when transferring to new task instances.

By Zhengzhu Liu, Zeming Gao, Haoyuan Qin, Jiawei Hu, Junhao Wu, Miao Zhu, Haipeng Zhang, Chennan Ma, Siqi Shen, Cheng Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Continual Reinforcement Learning with Neuroevolution

The paper investigates continual reinforcement learning using neuroevolution, comparing evolution strategies (ES) and genetic algorithms (GAs) across diverse environments and network sizes. ES consistently achieves a better balance between stability and plasticity, while GAs are more plastic but forget more. The authors attribute this to ES finding wider neighborhoods in weight space, with overlap between consecutive tasks correlating with the stability-plasticity trade‑off, and note that common RL plasticity issues do not transfer to neuroevolution.

By Eleni Nisioti, Andrea Cossu, Kathrin Korte, Sebastian Risi
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 8

When Does Scale-Invariant Optimization Become Unstable? An Exact Schedule Law with Weight Decay

The paper investigates how normalization makes neural networks scale‑invariant, creating a feedback loop between learning‑rate schedules and weight decay that controls the effective step size of the optimizer. It derives an exact discrete‑time law showing that a single scalar quantity captures all schedule and decay effects, with norm growth providing a self‑quenching counter‑force that defines a sharp boundary between contraction‑ and expansion‑dominated regimes. Through exact analysis of a normalized regression model and experiments on MLPs, CNNs, GPT‑2, and various datasets, the authors demonstrate that constant learning rates with weight decay are intrinsically unstable, leading to recurrent dynamics, and that adaptive optimizers exhibit weaker stabilization under normalization. "whyItMatters":"The study provides a precise, actionable rule for controlling training dynamics and schedule design in modern deep learning by isolating a single governing quantity for scale‑invariant optimization."

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 24

NGN: Learning Neural Network Size as a Differentiable Count

The paper introduces the Neurogenesis Network (NGN), a differentiable framework that learns the optimal number of ordered structural components in a neural network during training. By using a learnable boundary to select an active prefix of components, NGN can grow from a compact initialization and later discard unused parts. Experiments across MLPs, CNNs, GNNs, Transformers, state‑space models, LoRA, and adapters show that the learned prefixes perform comparably to fixed‑size models, demonstrating that structural capacity can be optimized directly as a count.

By Lixing Li