Automatic Noise Filtering with Dynamic Sparse Training in Deep Reinforcement Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tomorrow's robots will need to distinguish useful information from noise when performing different tasks. A household robot for instance may continuously receive a plethora of information about the home, but needs to focus on just a small subset to successfully execute its current chore. Filtering distracting inputs that contain irrelevant data has received little attention in the reinforcement learning literature. To start resolving this, we formulate a problem setting in reinforcement learning called the $\textit{extremely noisy environment}$ (ENE), where up to $99\%$ of the input features are pure noise. Agents need to detect which features provide task-relevant information about the state of the environment. Consequently, we propose a new method termed $\textit{Automatic Noise Filtering}$ (ANF), which uses the principles of dynamic sparse training in synergy with various deep reinforcement learning algorithms. The sparse input layer learns to focus its connectivity on task-relevant features, such that ANF-SAC and ANF-TD3 outperform standard SAC and TD3 by a large margin, while using up to $95\%$ fewer weights. Furthermore, we devise a transfer learning setting for ENEs, by permuting all features of the environment after 1M timesteps to simulate the fact that other information sources can become relevant as the world evolves. Again, ANF surpasses the baselines in final performance and sample complexity. Our code is available at https://github.com/bramgrooten/automatic-noise-filtering
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".