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Poster

The Dormant Neuron Phenomenon in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Value Factorization

Haoyuan Qin · Chennan Ma · Deng · Zhengzhu Liu · Songzhu Mei · Xinwang Liu · Cheng Wang · Siqi Shen


Abstract:

In this work, we study the dormant neuron phenomenon in multi-agent reinforcement learning value factorization, where the mixing network suffers from reduced network expressivity caused by an increasing number of inactive neurons. We demonstrate the presence of the dormant neuron phenomenon across multiple environments and algorithms, and show that this phenomenon negatively affects the learning process. We show that dormant neurons correlates with the existence of overweight neurons, which have large activation scores. To address the dormant neuron issue, we propose ReBorn, a simple but effective method that transfers the weights from overweight neurons to dormant neurons. We theoretically show that this method can ensure the learned action preferences are not forgotten after the weight-transferring procedure, which increases learning effectiveness. Our extensive experiments reveal that ReBorn achieves promising results across various environments and improves the performance of multiple popular value factorization approaches.

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