@inproceedings{
qin2024the,
title={The Dormant Neuron Phenomenon in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Value Factorization},
author={Haoyuan Qin and Chennan Ma and Mian Deng and Zhengzhu Liu and Songzhu Mei and Xinwang Liu and Cheng Wang and Siqi Shen},
booktitle={The Thirty-eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems},
year={2024},
url={https://openreview.net/forum?id=4NGrHrhJPx}
}
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 over-active 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 over-active 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. The source code of ReBorn is available in \url{https://github.com/xmu-rl-3dv/ReBorn}.
The Dormant Neuron Phenomenon in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Value Factorization
Haoyuan Qin Chennan Ma Mian Deng Zhengzhu Liu Songzhu Mei Xinwang Liu Cheng Wang Siqi Shen