Dimensionless Controls of Plasticity Under Alternating Tasks: From Evolutionary Biology to Continual Learning

arXiv:2608.23889 · math.OC, cs.LG · Submitted 2026-08-24 · Read on arXiv

math.OC, cs.LG

Submitted: 2026-08-24

Updated: 2026-08-24

Terminology

• Continual Learning — 14× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Accuracy — 8× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Catastrophic Forgetting — 6× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Hamming Distance — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generalization — 5× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Adam — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Robustness — 4× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Consistency — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Distribution Shift — 3× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Loss Function — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fisher Information — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Gradient Flow — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adaptation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Deep Reinforcement Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Diffusion Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 8 episodes
• Diffusion Models — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Generative Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Langevin Dynamics — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Representation Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Scaling Laws — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Trace — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Disentangling Linear Mode-Connectivity
• The Loss Surfaces of Multilayer Networks
• Gradient Descent on Neural Networks Typically Occurs at the Edge of Stability
• Deep Ensembles: A Loss Landscape Perspective
• Out-of-distribution forgetting: vulnerability of continual learning to intra-class distribution shift
• The Platonic Representation Hypothesis
• Deep linear neural networks with arbitrary loss: All local minima are global
• Linear Mode Connectivity in Multitask and Continual Learning
• On the curvature of the loss landscape
• Experience Replay for Continual Learning
• There Will Be a Scientific Theory of Deep Learning
• When Representations Align: Universality in Representation Learning Dynamics
• Tensor Programs V: Tuning Large Neural Networks via Zero-Shot Hyperparameter Transfer
• Gradient Surgery for Multi-Task Learning
• Why flatness does and does not correlate with generalization for deep neural networks
• Non-equilibrium physics: from spin glasses to machine and neural learning

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