On Understanding of the Dynamics of Model Capacity in Continual Learning
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arXiv
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| Auteurs principaux: | , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Publié: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866912536983502848 |
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| author | Chakraborty, Supriyo Raghavan, Krishnan |
| author_facet | Chakraborty, Supriyo Raghavan, Krishnan |
| contents | The stability-plasticity dilemma, closely related to a neural network's (NN) capacity-its ability to represent tasks-is a fundamental challenge in continual learning (CL). Within this context, we introduce CL's effective model capacity (CLEMC) that characterizes the dynamic behavior of the stability-plasticity balance point. We develop a difference equation to model the evolution of the interplay between the NN, task data, and optimization procedure. We then leverage CLEMC to demonstrate that the effective capacity-and, by extension, the stability-plasticity balance point is inherently non-stationary. We show that regardless of the NN architecture or optimization method, a NN's ability to represent new tasks diminishes when incoming task distributions differ from previous ones. We conduct extensive experiments to support our theoretical findings, spanning a range of architectures-from small feedforward network and convolutional networks to medium-sized graph neural networks and transformer-based large language models with millions of parameters. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_08052 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | On Understanding of the Dynamics of Model Capacity in Continual Learning Chakraborty, Supriyo Raghavan, Krishnan Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence The stability-plasticity dilemma, closely related to a neural network's (NN) capacity-its ability to represent tasks-is a fundamental challenge in continual learning (CL). Within this context, we introduce CL's effective model capacity (CLEMC) that characterizes the dynamic behavior of the stability-plasticity balance point. We develop a difference equation to model the evolution of the interplay between the NN, task data, and optimization procedure. We then leverage CLEMC to demonstrate that the effective capacity-and, by extension, the stability-plasticity balance point is inherently non-stationary. We show that regardless of the NN architecture or optimization method, a NN's ability to represent new tasks diminishes when incoming task distributions differ from previous ones. We conduct extensive experiments to support our theoretical findings, spanning a range of architectures-from small feedforward network and convolutional networks to medium-sized graph neural networks and transformer-based large language models with millions of parameters. |
| title | On Understanding of the Dynamics of Model Capacity in Continual Learning |
| topic | Machine Learning Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08052 |