Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: McKee, Kevin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.21229
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866916635568242688
author McKee, Kevin
author_facet McKee, Kevin
contents Training of deep reinforcement learning agents is slowed considerably by the presence of input dimensions that do not usefully condition the reward function. Existing modules such as layer normalization can be trained with weight decay to act as a form of selective attention, i.e. an input mask, that shrinks the scale of unnecessary inputs, which in turn accelerates training of the policy. However, we find a surprising result that adding numerous parameters to the computation of the input mask results in much faster training. A simple, high dimensional masking module is compared with layer normalization and a model without any input suppression. The high dimensional mask resulted in a four-fold speedup in training over the null hypothesis and a two-fold speedup in training over the layer normalization method.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_21229
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Method of Selective Attention for Reservoir Based Agents
McKee, Kevin
Machine Learning
Training of deep reinforcement learning agents is slowed considerably by the presence of input dimensions that do not usefully condition the reward function. Existing modules such as layer normalization can be trained with weight decay to act as a form of selective attention, i.e. an input mask, that shrinks the scale of unnecessary inputs, which in turn accelerates training of the policy. However, we find a surprising result that adding numerous parameters to the computation of the input mask results in much faster training. A simple, high dimensional masking module is compared with layer normalization and a model without any input suppression. The high dimensional mask resulted in a four-fold speedup in training over the null hypothesis and a two-fold speedup in training over the layer normalization method.
title A Method of Selective Attention for Reservoir Based Agents
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.21229