Related papers: Novelty Producing Synaptic Plasticity
Continual learning algorithms strive to acquire new knowledge while preserving prior information. Often, these algorithms emphasise stability and restrict network updates upon learning new tasks. In many cases, such restrictions come at a…
The loss of plasticity in learning agents, analogous to the solidification of neural pathways in biological brains, significantly impedes learning and adaptation in reinforcement learning due to its non-stationary nature. To address this…
Neural Processes (NPs) are powerful and flexible models able to incorporate uncertainty when representing stochastic processes, while maintaining a linear time complexity. However, NPs produce a latent description by aggregating independent…
When training neural networks for classification tasks with backpropagation, parameters are updated on every trial, even if the sample is classified correctly. In contrast, humans concentrate their learning effort on errors. Inspired by…
Underpinning the past decades of work on the design, initialization, and optimization of neural networks is a seemingly innocuous assumption: that the network is trained on a \textit{stationary} data distribution. In settings where this…
The brain is a nonlinear and highly Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). This RNN is surprisingly plastic and supports our astonishing ability to learn and execute complex tasks. However, learning is incredibly complicated due to the brain's…
The adaptive learning capabilities seen in biological neural networks are largely a product of the self-modifying behavior emerging from online plastic changes in synaptic connectivity. Current methods in Reinforcement Learning (RL) only…
In this paper, we study the technical problem of developing conversational agents that can quickly adapt to unseen tasks, learn task-specific communication tactics, and help listeners finish complex, temporally extended tasks. We find that…
Reinforcement learning can solve decision-making problems and train an agent to behave in an environment according to a predesigned reward function. However, such an approach becomes very problematic if the reward is too sparse and so the…
Humans and animals learn throughout life. Such continual learning is crucial for intelligence. In this chapter, we examine the pivotal role plasticity mechanisms with complex internal synaptic dynamics could play in enabling this ability in…
We present a new approach for efficient exploration which leverages a low-dimensional encoding of the environment learned with a combination of model-based and model-free objectives. Our approach uses intrinsic rewards that are based on the…
A key challenge for reinforcement learning is solving long-horizon planning problems. Recent work has leveraged programs to guide reinforcement learning in these settings. However, these approaches impose a high manual burden on the user…
The discovery of neural plasticity has proved that throughout the life of a human being, the brain reorganizes itself through forming new neural connections. The formation of new neural connections are achieved through the brain's effort to…
Behavioral changes in animals and humans, as a consequence of an error or a verbal instruction, can be extremely rapid. Improvement in behavioral performances are usually associated in machine learning and reinforcement learning to synaptic…
In problem-solving, we humans can come up with multiple novel solutions to the same problem. However, reinforcement learning algorithms can only produce a set of monotonous policies that maximize the cumulative reward but lack diversity and…
The impressive lifelong learning in animal brains is primarily enabled by plastic changes in synaptic connectivity. Importantly, these changes are not passive, but are actively controlled by neuromodulation, which is itself under the…
Robotics grasping refers to the task of making a robotic system pick an object by applying forces and torques on its surface. Despite the recent advances in data-driven approaches, grasping remains an unsolved problem. Most of the works on…
The ability to continuously learn remains elusive for deep learning models. Unlike humans, models cannot accumulate knowledge in their weights when learning new tasks, mainly due to an excess of plasticity and the low incentive to reuse…
In Reinforcement Learning, agents learn policies by exploring and interacting with the environment. Due to the curse of dimensionality, learning policies that map high-dimensional sensory input to motor output is particularly challenging.…
Recent advancements in flow-matching have enabled high-quality text-to-image generation. However, the deterministic nature of flow-matching models makes them poorly suited for reinforcement learning, a key tool for improving image quality…