Continual training of deep neural networks under non-stationarity often leads to a progressive loss of plasticity, eventually limiting further learning. We relate plasticity to the empirical Neural Tangent Kernel, and identify dynamical isometry (the condition that layer-wise Jacobian singular values remain close to one) as a key mechanism for preserving plasticity in continual learning.
arXiv:2607. 13432v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Plasticity -- a neural network's ability to adapt to new tasks -- is critical for continual and transfer learning.
By Jiaxuan Cheng
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.
By Jeong Min Kong, Richard S. Sutton
arXiv:2608. 12874v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Plasticity loss has emerged as a critical challenge in continual learning that significantly hinders the acquisition of sequential tasks.
By Zeyang Zhang, Tieliang Gong, Junyan Lu, Weizhan Zhang
arXiv:2605. 15435v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Standard deep-learning pipelines usually choose the network architecture before training and keep it fixed throughout optimization.
By Lute Lillo, Nick Cheney
Plasticity loss has emerged as a critical challenge in continual learning that significantly hinders the acquisition of sequential tasks. While optimizing activation designs offers a potential solution, current fixed-form functions suffer from an inherent spectral bias towards low-frequency variations, whereas learnable variants permit unconstrained updates that induce catastrophic forgetting.
arXiv:2606. 30559v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We characterize weakly regularized continual classification in homogeneous models as sequential projections onto task margin sets.
By Matan Schliserman, Gon Buzaglo, Itay Evron, Daniel Soudry
arXiv:2608. 15901v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning regularizers like EWC fight forgetting by penalizing changes from previous-task parameters with per-parameter importance, typically diagonal Fisher values.
By Brian B. Moser, Ahmed Anwar, Tobias Christian Nauen, Shishir Muralidhara, Federico Raue, Ren\'e Schuster, Stanislav Frolov, Andreas Dengel
arXiv:2606. 26629v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Weight-space regularization methods such as Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) are the standard approach to catastrophic forgetting in continual learning.
By Evan Ning, Wei Xue, Dong Lou, Yike Guo
arXiv:2505. 13196v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Velocity-Regularized Adam (VRAdam), a physics-inspired optimizer for training deep neural networks that draws on ideas from quartic terms for kinetic energy with its stabilizing effects on various system dynamics.
By Pranav Vaidhyanathan, Lucas Schorling, Natalia Ares, Maike Osborne
arXiv:2606. 24007v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Continual learning remains a major challenge for modern deep networks, partly because commonly used optimizers lack inherent mechanisms for continual adaptation.
By Subarnaduti Paul, Yohan Jung, Mohammad Emtiyaz Khan, Siddharth Swaroop, Thomas M\"ollenhoff, Martin Mundt
arXiv:2607. 12112v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Federated fine-tuning of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) across distributed networks enables privacy-sensitive adaptation to evolving data streams, yet a fundamental obstacle prevents robust deployment in dynamic environments: catastrophic forgetting, wherein sequential task updates erase previously acquired knowledge across visual, linguistic, and cross-modal representations.
By Jing Liu, Chenxuanyin Zou, Jiayang Ren, Gaoyun Fang, Chengfang Li, Yan Wang, Zhenchao Ma, Bo Hu