用梯度代替激活值,更准发现神经元失效问题
Measure gradients, not activations! Enhancing neuronal activity in deep reinforcement learning
- 以梯度大小衡量神经元学习能力,而非传统激活值
- 新指标GraMa可检测残差网络、扩散模型等中的神经元失活
- 基于该指标重置神经元能提升多种强化学习算法性能
深度强化学习代理常因神经元活动衰减而难以适应新数据和持续学习。现有方法如tau-休眠神经元比率依赖激活统计量来评估神经元表达能力,但在复杂架构中统计效力下降。本文提出,在先进RL代理中,维持神经元通过梯度更新的适应能力比保持表达能力更为关键。基于此,我们将统计目标从激活值转向梯度,提出轻量级、架构无关的神经元学习能力度量指标GraMa(Gradient Magnitude Neural Activity Metric)。实验表明,GraMa能有效揭示残差网络、扩散模型及不同激活函数下的持续神经元不活跃现象。此外,基于GraMa引导的神经元重置方法ReGraMa,在MuJoCo和DeepMind Control Suite等多个基准上,对多种深度RL算法均显著提升学习性能。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) agents frequently suffer from neuronal activity loss, which impairs their ability to adapt to new data and learn continually. A common method to quantify and address this issue is the tau-dormant neuron ratio, which uses activation statistics to measure the expressive ability of neurons. While effective for simple MLP-based agents, this approach loses statistical power in more complex architectures. To address this, we argue that in advanced RL agents, maintaining a neuron's learning capacity, its ability to adapt via gradient updates, is more critical than preserving its expressive ability. Based on this insight, we shift the statistical objective from activations to gradients, and introduce GraMa (Gradient Magnitude Neural Activity Metric), a lightweight, architecture-agnostic metric for quantifying neuron-level learning capacity. We show that GraMa effectively reveals persistent neuron inactivity across diverse architectures, including residual networks, diffusion models, and agents with varied activation functions. Moreover, resetting neurons guided by GraMa (ReGraMa) consistently improves learning performance across multiple deep RL algorithms and benchmarks, such as MuJoCo and the DeepMind Control Suite.
Thank you to arXiv for use of its open access interoperability. PaperDance 不是 arXiv 官方产品;中文卡片由大模型生成,请以原文为准。