Learning Sparse Representations Incrementally in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sparse representations have been shown to be useful in deep reinforcement learning for mitigating catastrophic interference and improving the performance of agents in terms of cumulative reward. Previous results were based on a two step process were the representation was learned offline and the action-value function was learned online afterwards. In this paper, we investigate if it is possible to learn a sparse representation and the action-value function simultaneously and incrementally. We investigate this question by employing several regularization techniques and observing how they affect sparsity of the representation learned by a DQN agent in two different benchmark domains. Our results show that with appropriate regularization it is possible to increase the sparsity of the representations learned by DQN agents. Moreover, we found that learning sparse representations also resulted in improved performance in terms of cumulative reward. Finally, we found that the performance of the agents that learned a sparse representation was more robust to the size of the experience replay buffer. This last finding supports the long standing hypothesis that the overlap in representations learned by deep neural networks is the leading cause of catastrophic interference.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it