Self-Activating Neural Ensembles for Continual Reinforcement Learning
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Abstract (arXiv)
The ability for an agent to continuously learn new skills without catastrophically forgetting existing knowledge is of critical importance for the development of generally intelligent agents. Most methods devised to address this problem depend heavily on well-defined task boundaries, and thus depend on human supervision. Our task-agnostic method, Self-Activating Neural Ensembles (SANE), uses a modular architecture designed to avoid catastrophic forgetting without making any such assumptions. At the beginning of each trajectory, a module in the SANE ensemble is activated to determine the agent's next policy. During training, new modules are created as needed and only activated modules are updated to ensure that unused modules remain unchanged. This system enables our method to retain and leverage old skills, while growing and learning new ones. We demonstrate our approach on visually rich procedurally generated environments.
Key facts. Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 70 of its 104 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 31 Dec 2022.
Builds on
70 of 104 references.
References · 70
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38 more
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50 most cited of 70 All 70 (JSON)
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Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 1; 2025: 2.
5 papers.
- 2023Prediction and Control in Continual Reinforcement Learningcited by 19
- 2025A Survey of Continual Reinforcement Learningcited by 16
- 2023Evaluating Continual Learning on a Home Robotcited by 4
- 2024Continual learning with the neural tangent ensemblecited by 4
- 2025Lifelong Reinforcement Learning with Similarity-Driven Weighting by Large Modelscited by 0
- 2025A Survey of Continual Reinforcement Learning27 Jun 2025
- 2025Lifelong Reinforcement Learning with Similarity-Driven Weighting by Large Models17 Mar 2025
- 2024Continual learning with the neural tangent ensemble30 Aug 2024
- 2023Prediction and Control in Continual Reinforcement Learning18 Dec 2023
- 2023Evaluating Continual Learning on a Home Robot4 Jun 2023