Topic: continual learning

ACML brings together research on the theory and practice of machine learning, with conference and journal publication tracks, invited talks, tutorials and workshops. The 2026 tutorial programme covers efficient and trustworthy reasoning with foundation models, robust statistical learning with alpha-divergence, topological deep learning, multimodal time series, generative methods for causal inference, distribution shifts, and continual learning toward self-evolving agents. Researchers from all regions are welcome. The event runs 1–4 December 2026. Its registration system lists an overall 08:00

Permanent, full-time reader appointment in the School of Informatics, with hybrid working. Research should advance AI methods at the intersection of perception and action. Relevant areas include continual learning, agentic and world models, embodied intelligence, reinforcement learning, decision-making under uncertainty and long-duration autonomy. Responsibilities include original research, undergraduate and postgraduate teaching, and student supervision. The advertised closing time is 23:59 UK time on 20 October 2026.

Sara Hooker of Adaptation Lab explores AI systems that change with their users, tasks and environments. The discussion connects continual learning, efficient adaptation and automated science with the difficulty of evaluating tasks that lack easily checked answers. It also covers interfaces, distillation, open models, safety and regulation, multilingual tokenization, and possible successors to current Transformer systems. Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv and Allen Roush. Watch the full conversation on the publisher’s YouTube channel.

Rohan Anil of Core Automation discusses the relationship between pretraining, reinforcement learning and learning after deployment. Drawing on his optimization work at Google and Anthropic, he examines why additional post-training, distillation and longer contexts may not solve continual learning. Other topics include second-order optimizers, distributed training, low-level coding agents and the difficulty of coordinating very large GPU clusters. Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv and Allen Roush. Watch the full conversation on the publisher’s YouTube channel.

Dimitris Papailiopoulos of Microsoft Research and the University of Wisconsin discusses how coding agents change scientific research. The conversation covers small arithmetic transformers, symbolic mathematical reasoning, interacting agents, and the role of human judgment and verification. It also examines diversity in machine-generated ideas, benchmark and harness overfitting, persistent agent errors, continual learning, world models, and where information theory helps explain AI. Hosted by Ravid Shwartz Ziv and Allen Roush; the full conversation is available on the publisher's YouTube channe

Over the course of a lifetime, we process a continual stream of information. Extracted from this stream, memories must be efficiently encoded and stored in an addressable manner for retrieval. To explore potential mechanisms, we consider a familiarity detection task where a subject reports whether an image has been previously encountered. We design a feedforward network endowed with synaptic plasticity and an addressing matrix, meta-learned to optimize familiarity detection over long intervals. We find that anti-Hebbian plasticity leads to better performance than Hebbian and replicates experim

Deep learning has made tremendous progress in the last year but it's high computational and memory requirements impose challenges in using deep learning on edge devices. There has been some progress in lowering memory requirements of deep neural networks (for instance, use of half-precision) but there has been minimal effort in developing alternative efficient computational paradigms. Inspired by the brain, Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) provide an energy-efficient alternative to conventional rate-based neural networks. However, SNN architectures that employ the traditional feedforward and feed

The brain is remarkably adept at learning from a continuous stream of data without significantly forgetting previously learnt skills. Conventional machine learning models struggle at continual learning, as weight updates that optimize the current task interfere with previously learnt tasks. A simple remedy to catastrophic forgetting is freezing a network pretrained on a set of base tasks, and training task-specific readouts on this shared trunk. However, this assumes that representations in the frozen network are separable under new tasks, therefore leading to sub-par performance. To continual

Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly through the development of artificial neural networks (ANNs), has significantly benefited from insights gained from neuroscience. This progress has enhanced the replication of complex cognitive tasks such as vision and natural language processing (1,2). However, ANNs still struggle with continual learning, adaptable knowledge transfer, robustness, and resource efficiency - capabilities that biological systems handle seamlessly (3–8). Neuromodulators, the chemical messengers that target neurons and synapses in specific brain regions,

Continual learning involves a network adapting to new data while retaining previously learned information. In Artificial Neural Networks , this process faces the challenge of catastrophic forgetting, where updating parameters with new data causes an exponential decline in accuracy over time for previously learned tasks. Several methods have been proposed to address this problem and enable continual learning on future neuromorphic hardware. One such neuroscience-inspired method is metaplasticity, which refers to a network's ability to change the learning capacity of its synapses based on its cu

Recent studies have shown that synaptic spines undergo spontaneous size fluctuations, a phenomenon that is hypothesized to be critical to understanding synaptic plasticity and neural network stability [1,2]. In this work, we develop a model for spine size dynamics using a simple stochastic process based on minimal biological assumptions. This model effectively captures the key characteristics of spontaneous spine fluctuations, particularly replicating the observed lognormal distribution of spine sizes. We then use an artificial neural network structure where synaptic strengths fluctuate accor

Continual learning focuses on systems that incrementally acquire and update their knowledge. It is a pressing problem in machine learning as it is challenging to learn new tasks without forgetting knowledge about old ones, a phenomenon known as catastrophic forgetting [1]. Since biological systems are able to efficiently learn and update their knowledge continually during their lifetime, we are interested in principles inspired by these systems to try to tackle this challenge. One of the ideas in biology that is often overlooked in artificial neural networks is Dale’s principle [2], stating th