{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/addressing-loss-of-plasticity-and","title":"Addressing Loss of Plasticity and Catastrophic Forgetting in Continual Learning","arxiv_id":"2404.00781","date":"2024-03-31","proceeding":null,"authors":["Mohamed Elsayed","A. Rupam Mahmood"],"abstract":"Deep representation learning methods struggle with continual learning, suffering from both catastrophic forgetting of useful units and loss of plasticity, often due to rigid and unuseful units. While many methods address these two issues separately, only a few currently deal with both simultaneously. In this paper, we introduce Utility-based Perturbed Gradient Descent (UPGD) as a novel approach for the continual learning of representations. UPGD combines gradient updates with perturbations, where it applies smaller modifications to more useful units, protecting them from forgetting, and larger modifications to less useful units, rejuvenating their plasticity. We use a challenging streaming learning setup where continual learning problems have hundreds of non-stationarities and unknown task boundaries. We show that many existing methods suffer from at least one of the issues, predominantly manifested by their decreasing accuracy over tasks. On the other hand, UPGD continues to improve performance and surpasses or is competitive with all methods in all problems. Finally, in extended reinforcement learning experiments with PPO, we show that while Adam exhibits a performance drop after initial learning, UPGD avoids it by addressing both continual learning issues.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.00781v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.00781v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"addressing-loss-of-plasticity-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/mohmdelsayed/upgd","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"continual-learning","task_name":"Continual Learning"},{"task_slug":"representation-learning","task_name":"Representation Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"entropy-regularization","method_name":"Entropy Regularization"},{"method_slug":"ppo","method_name":"PPO"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2404.00781","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2404.00781","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2404.00781"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/mohmdelsayed/upgd","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"f9756845098fdb02","entry":"FirstOrderLocalUPGD","repo":"mohmdelsayed/upgd","repo_kind":"official","path":"core/optim/feature_upgd/first_order.py","file_url":"https://github.com/mohmdelsayed/upgd/blob/HEAD/core/optim/feature_upgd/first_order.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran","verification_level":1,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"f9756845098fdb02"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}