Neuroplastic Expansion in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Liu, Jiashun, Obando-Ceron, Johan, Courville, Aaron, Pan, Ling
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Liu, Jiashun
Obando-Ceron, Johan
Courville, Aaron
Pan, Ling
author_facet Liu, Jiashun
Obando-Ceron, Johan
Courville, Aaron
Pan, Ling
contents The loss of plasticity in learning agents, analogous to the solidification of neural pathways in biological brains, significantly impedes learning and adaptation in reinforcement learning due to its non-stationary nature. To address this fundamental challenge, we propose a novel approach, {\it Neuroplastic Expansion} (NE), inspired by cortical expansion in cognitive science. NE maintains learnability and adaptability throughout the entire training process by dynamically growing the network from a smaller initial size to its full dimension. Our method is designed with three key components: (\textit{1}) elastic topology generation based on potential gradients, (\textit{2}) dormant neuron pruning to optimize network expressivity, and (\textit{3}) neuron consolidation via experience review to strike a balance in the plasticity-stability dilemma. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NE effectively mitigates plasticity loss and outperforms state-of-the-art methods across various tasks in MuJoCo and DeepMind Control Suite environments. NE enables more adaptive learning in complex, dynamic environments, which represents a crucial step towards transitioning deep reinforcement learning from static, one-time training paradigms to more flexible, continually adapting models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_07994
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Neuroplastic Expansion in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Liu, Jiashun
Obando-Ceron, Johan
Courville, Aaron
Pan, Ling
Machine Learning
The loss of plasticity in learning agents, analogous to the solidification of neural pathways in biological brains, significantly impedes learning and adaptation in reinforcement learning due to its non-stationary nature. To address this fundamental challenge, we propose a novel approach, {\it Neuroplastic Expansion} (NE), inspired by cortical expansion in cognitive science. NE maintains learnability and adaptability throughout the entire training process by dynamically growing the network from a smaller initial size to its full dimension. Our method is designed with three key components: (\textit{1}) elastic topology generation based on potential gradients, (\textit{2}) dormant neuron pruning to optimize network expressivity, and (\textit{3}) neuron consolidation via experience review to strike a balance in the plasticity-stability dilemma. Extensive experiments demonstrate that NE effectively mitigates plasticity loss and outperforms state-of-the-art methods across various tasks in MuJoCo and DeepMind Control Suite environments. NE enables more adaptive learning in complex, dynamic environments, which represents a crucial step towards transitioning deep reinforcement learning from static, one-time training paradigms to more flexible, continually adapting models.
title Neuroplastic Expansion in Deep Reinforcement Learning
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07994