A Study of Plasticity Loss in On-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning

Continual learning with deep neural networks presents challenges distinct from both the fixed-dataset and convex continual learning regimes. One such challenge is plasticity loss, wherein a neural network trained in an online fashion displays a degraded ability to fit new tasks. This problem has been extensively studied in both supervised learning and off-policy reinforcement learning (RL), where a number of remedies have been proposed. Still, plasticity loss has received less attention in the on-policy deep RL setting. Here we perform an extensive set of experiments examining plasticity loss and a variety of mitigation methods in on-policy deep RL. We demonstrate that plasticity loss is pervasive under domain shift in this regime, and that a number of methods developed to resolve it in other settings fail, sometimes even resulting in performance that is worse than performing no intervention at all. In contrast, we find that a class of “regenerative” methods are able to consistently mitigate plasticity loss in a variety of contexts, including in gridworld tasks and more challenging environments like Montezuma’s Revenge and ProcGen.