Characterizing plastic regions in neural networks
Presented at The Workshop on Continual Adaptation at Scale: Towards Sustainable AI at the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026 Workshop CATS)
Adapting a trained model to a new domain without overwriting prior knowledge is useful only when the model contains a region whose parameter state can support new learning. In vision classifiers, we study plastic regions: contiguous, easily-discoverable regions in which some manipulation of the region improves the target–source trade-off over size-matched control strips elsewhere in the same network. We first characterize a plastic region in ResNet-18 and show that it transfers across target domains, compounds under sequential adaptation, and can be manipulated to recover adaptation capacity at rigid checkpoints. We then analyze plastic-region existence across nine architectures and report observations about network properties that appear to enable or obstruct plastic-region formation.
Recommended citation: Liu, G., Shavit, N. N., & Kong, L. (2026, July). Characterizing plastic regions in neural networks [Poster presentation]. The Workshop on Continual Adaptation at Scale: Towards Sustainable AI at the 43rd International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2026 Workshop CATS), Seoul, South Korea.
Download Paper