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arXiv · 2411.04034

Non-Stationary Learning of Neural Networks with Automatic Soft Parameter Reset

Alexandre Galashov·Michalis K. Titsias·András György·Clare Lyle·Razvan Pascanu·Yee Whye Teh·Maneesh Sahani
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Abstract

Neural networks are traditionally trained under the assumption that data come from a stationary distribution. However, settings which violate this assumption are becoming more popular; examples include supervised learning under distributional shifts, reinforcement learning, continual learning and non-stationary contextual bandits. In this work we introduce a novel learning approach that automatically models and adapts to non-stationarity, via an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process with an adaptive drift parameter. The adaptive drift tends to draw the parameters towards the initialisation distribution, so the approach can be understood as a form of soft parameter reset. We show empirically that our approach performs well in non-stationary supervised and off-policy reinforcement learning settings.

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Alexandre Galashov, Michalis K. Titsias, András György, Clare Lyle, Razvan Pascanu, Yee Whye Teh, Maneesh Sahani. 2024-11-06. Non-Stationary Learning of Neural Networks with Automatic Soft Parameter Reset. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.04034

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