---
title: "PathNet — paper by Fernando et al. (2017) — summary and ideas"
description: "The authors propose PathNet, a modular network of several layers, each with many small modules. 22 references, cited by 76 papers here."
authors: ["Chrisantha Fernando", "Dylan Banarse", "Charles Blundell", "Yori Zwols", "David Ha", "Andrei A. Rusu", "Alexander Pritzel", "Daan Wierstra"]
year: 2017
venue: "arXiv:1701.08734"
source: "https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.08734"
doi: "10.48550/arxiv.1701.08734"
arxiv: "1701.08734"
licence: "arXiv — non-exclusive licence to distribute"
licence_url: "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/fernando-2017-pathnet-evolution-channels-gradient-descent/"
---
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# PathNet: Evolution Channels Gradient Descent in Super Neural Networks

**Authors:** [Chrisantha Fernando](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/chrisantha-fernando/), [Dylan Banarse](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/dylan-banarse/), [Charles Blundell](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/charles-blundell/), Yori Zwols, [David Ha](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/david-ha/), Andrei A. Rusu, [Alexander Pritzel](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/alexander-pritzel/) and [Daan Wierstra](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/daan-wierstra/) · **Year:** 2017 · **Venue:** arXiv:1701.08734 · **Licence:** [arXiv — non-exclusive licence to distribute](http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.08734) · [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.08734) · [DOI 10.48550/arxiv.1701.08734](https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1701.08734) · [arXiv 1701.08734](https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.08734) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2583761661)

**Citations:** 591 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [76](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/fernando-2017-pathnet-evolution-channels-gradient-descent/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The paper asks how one very large neural network could learn many tasks one after another. The goal is to reuse earlier knowledge without overwriting it, which is known as catastrophic forgetting. The authors propose PathNet, a modular network of several layers, each with many small modules. A population of "pathways" is defined, where each pathway selects a few modules per layer. Only the selected modules take part in forward and backward passes. A tournament-selection genetic algorithm copies and mutates the better-performing pathways, while gradient descent (SGD, or A3C for reinforcement learning) trains the weights inside them. Once a task is learned, the winning pathway is frozen, the remaining parameters are reset, and fresh pathways evolve for the next task. Experiments cover binary MNIST, CIFAR, SVHN, Atari games and Labyrinth levels. In all of these domains, PathNet transferred knowledge to the second task better than learning from scratch or fine-tuning. It also made A3C less sensitive to hyperparameter choices. The work suggests that evolving which parameters to train is a practical route to continual and transfer learning.

## Key points
- **Supervised architecture:** For the binary MNIST tasks, PathNet has L = 3 layers with M = 10 modules each, and each module has 20 ReLU neurons. A pathway may use at most 3 modules per layer. Each task gets its own linear readout. CIFAR and SVHN use a larger version with M = 20 modules per layer.
- **Evolution setup:** The population holds 64 genotypes, and selection is a binary tournament. During mutation, each genotype element changes with probability 1/(N×L) by an integer in [−2, 2]. For MNIST, evaluating one pathway means training it with SGD (learning rate 0.0001) on 50 mini-batches of 16 examples.
- **Harder MNIST variant:** The binary MNIST tasks add 50% salt-and-pepper noise. Each task is trained until it reaches perfect accuracy on the training set.
- **Reinforcement learning setup:** All 64 A3C workers evaluate pathways in parallel, so each worker updates only its own subset of parameters. The illustrative experiment trains Pong and then Alien, for 80M timesteps each.
- **Labyrinth results:** Performance was measured as area under the learning curve, compared against a de novo baseline. Fine-tuning averaged a ratio of 1.00, while PathNet averaged 1.26. PathNet also outperformed the controls on seekavoid arena across a sweep of 243 hyperparameter settings.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

📚 Shelves (2): [🖥️ Computer Science](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/) · 18,614 works · [🤖 Artificial Intelligence](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/artificial-intelligence/) · 17,965 works

## Cite

Cite as: Chrisantha Fernando, Dylan Banarse, Charles Blundell, Yori Zwols, David Ha, Andrei A. Rusu, Alexander Pritzel and Daan Wierstra. 2017. PathNet: Evolution Channels Gradient Descent in Super Neural Networks. arXiv:1701.08734.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@misc{fernando2017pathnet,
  title = {{PathNet: Evolution Channels Gradient Descent in Super Neural Networks}},
  author = {Chrisantha Fernando, Dylan Banarse, Charles Blundell, Yori Zwols, David Ha, Andrei A. Rusu, Alexander Pritzel and Daan Wierstra},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.1701.08734},
  eprint = {1701.08734},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1701.08734}
}
```

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## References

22 references, 4 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 2 November 2026*