On the Stability of Growth in Structural Plasticity
arXiv:2605. 15435v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard deep-learning pipelines usually choose the network architecture before training and keep it fixed throughout optimization.
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.
arXiv:2605. 15435v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard deep-learning pipelines usually choose the network architecture before training and keep it fixed throughout optimization.
arXiv:2608. 04358v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning (CL) requires models to learn tasks sequentially, yet deep neural networks often suffer from plasticity loss and poor knowledge transfer, which can impede their long-term adaptability.
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: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.
arXiv:2608. 01475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Neural networks that can grow or both grow and shrink during learning, referred to as growing neural networks and elastic neural networks, respectively, have recently been explored in offline continual learning with a particular focus on catastrophic forgetting.
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.
arXiv:2606. 30669v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Backpropagation-trained dense neural networks are powerful function approximators, but they couple learning across many parameters and can overwrite previous associations when tasks conflict.
arXiv:2609.35897v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The pursuit of recursive self-improvement (RSI) toward general intelligence is divided between macro-level language model scaling and the interaction-d...
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:2609.37702v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Class Incremental Learning (Class-IL) requires models to learn new classes over time while preserving previously acquired knowledge without access to...
arXiv:2507. 14056v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work in continual learning has highlighted the stability gap -- a temporary performance drop on previously learned tasks when new ones are introduced.
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.