Sutton's 15th PhD student publishes thesis on lifelong plasticity in neural networks
RichardSSutton · x · 2026-10-04
Reinforcement learning pioneer Richard Sutton announced that the PhD thesis of his 15th doctoral student, Shibhansh Dohare, is now available: Learning Forever using Artificial Neural Networks.
The dissertation centers on plasticity — the ability of neural networks to keep learning new things:
- Systems interacting with the real world become outdated unless they continually learn from new, partially observable information
- Naturally intelligent systems all learn continually to keep up with change
- Applications like market/weather prediction, learning human preferences, and controlling factories or prosthetics require AI that learns forever
- The thesis provides direct and thorough empirical demonstrations of this capability
A notable release for anyone following continual learning and plasticity loss research.
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