Annalisa Belloni
Explaining Loss of Plasticity in Continual Learning via Loss Landscapes and Mitigating it through Expressivity Preservation.
Rel. Raffaello Camoriano. Politecnico di Torino, Corso di laurea magistrale in Data Science And Engineering, 2025
Abstract
In deep learning research, enabling models to continuously and robustly acquire new knowledge represents a crucial step toward achieving more adaptive and efficient systems. Yet, when exposed to sequential streams of data, neural networks often struggle to maintain performance, suffering either from catastrophic forgetting (the erosion of previously acquired knowledge) or from loss of plasticity (LoP). This thesis specifically addresses the loss of plasticity phenomenon, marked by the progressive decline of a neural network’s representational capacity and the resulting inability to learn effectively from new data, particularly when training relies on traditional optimization methods, such as stochastic gradient descent (SGD) combined with backpropagation.
Recognizing that evolving data corresponds to changing tasks, and thus to shifts in the loss function and in its landscape, we frame our analysis through a loss landscape perspective and provide a novel characterization of LoP by examining the geometric characteristics of the landscape traversed by the optimizer
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