arXiv:2512.12713cs.NEcs.LG2025-12

让神经网络像生物一样自我生长修剪,动态调整大小提升控制性能。

Self-Motivated Growing Neural Network for Adaptive Architecture via Local Structural Plasticity

  • 通过局部结构可塑性模块,根据权重变化自动增删神经元。
  • 在控制任务中表现优于固定结构网络,收益更高且方差更小。
  • 适合需要自适应容量的强化学习场景,如机器人控制。

控制策略通常采用预先设定结构的多层感知机,无法在学习过程中动态调整容量。本文提出自激励生长神经网络(SMGrNN),一种通过局部结构可塑性模块(SPM)在线演化拓扑的梯度训练控制器。SPM在短时窗内监控边级权重更新统计量,并据此触发神经元插入与剪枝,而突触权重由标准梯度优化器更新。该机制使网络容量可在学习中自适应调节,无需人工调参。在基于策略蒸馏的控制基准测试中,SMGrNN相较于多层感知机基线,达到相当或更高的回报、更低的方差,并生成任务适配的网络规模。消融实验表明:启用生长可提升奖励稳定性,剪枝防止过度扩张并促进紧凑结构形成。这些结果验证了局部结构可塑性在梯度训练网络中的独立价值,并提示未来可探索其向更局部或脉冲学习场景的扩展可能性。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Control policies are often implemented with fixed-capacity multilayer perceptrons trained by backpropagation, which require architecture selection in advance and cannot adapt their capacity during learning. This paper introduces the Self-Motivated Growing Neural Network (SMGrNN), a gradient-trained controller whose topology evolves online through a local Structural Plasticity Module (SPM). The SPM monitors edge-wise weight update statistics over short temporal windows and uses these local signals to trigger neuron insertion and pruning, while synaptic weights are optimized by a standard gradient-based optimizer. This allows network capacity to be adjusted during learning without manual architectural tuning. SMGrNN is evaluated on control benchmarks via policy distillation. Compared with multilayer perceptron baselines, it achieves similar or higher returns, lower variance, and task-appropriate network sizes. Ablation studies with growth disabled and growth-only variants isolate the role of structural plasticity, showing that adaptive growth improves reward stability while pruning prevents uncontrolled expansion and supports compact network formation. These results establish the independent value of local structural plasticity within gradient-trained networks and motivate future investigation of whether similar structural rules can be extended to more local or spike-based learning settings.

神经网络自适应架构结构可塑性强化学习

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