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Related papers: Novelty Producing Synaptic Plasticity

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Exploration in complex domains is a key challenge in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks with very sparse rewards. Recent successes in deep reinforcement learning have been achieved mostly using simple heuristic exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2017-03-07 Joshua Achiam , Shankar Sastry

Finding meaningful and accurate dense rewards is a fundamental task in the field of reinforcement learning (RL) that enables agents to explore environments more efficiently. In traditional RL settings, agents learn optimal policies through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Shuyuan Zhang

The discovery of functional molecules is an expensive and time-consuming process, exemplified by the rising costs of small molecule therapeutic discovery. One class of techniques of growing interest for early-stage drug discovery is de novo…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2020-02-18 Wenhao Gao , Connor W. Coley

The pursuit of energy-efficient and adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) has positioned neuromorphic computing as a promising alternative to conventional computing. However, achieving learning on these platforms requires techniques that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Jesús García Fernández , Nasir Ahmad , Marcel van Gerven

Learning and memory relies on synapses changing their strengths in response to neural activity. However there is a substantial gap between the timescales of neural electrical dynamics (1-100 ms) and organism behaviour during learning…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2023-08-08 Cian O'Donnell

This paper investigates the fundamental mechanisms driving plasticity loss in deep reinforcement learning (RL), a critical challenge where neural networks lose their ability to adapt to non-stationary environments. While existing research…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Zhiqiang He

A growing body of research indicates that structural plasticity mechanisms are crucial for learning and memory consolidation. Starting from a simple phenomenological model, we exploit a mean-field approach to develop a theoretical framework…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2024-06-19 Gianmarco Tiddia , Luca Sergi , Bruno Golosio

We seek to align agent behavior with a user's objectives in a reinforcement learning setting with unknown dynamics, an unknown reward function, and unknown unsafe states. The user knows the rewards and unsafe states, but querying the user…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2021-03-26 Siddharth Reddy , Anca D. Dragan , Sergey Levine , Shane Legg , Jan Leike

Learning and adaptation play great role in emergent socio-economic phenomena. Complex dynamics has been previously found in the systems of multiple learning agents interacting via a simple game. Meanwhile, the single agent adaptation is…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-05-18 Arkady Zgonnikov , Ihor Lubashevsky

Understanding how the brain learns to compute functions reliably, efficiently and robustly with noisy spiking activity is a fundamental challenge in neuroscience. Most sensory and motor tasks can be described as dynamical systems and could…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2017-05-24 Sophie Denève , Alireza Alemi , Ralph Bourdoukan

Catastrophic forgetting/interference is a critical problem for lifelong learning machines, which impedes the agents from maintaining their previously learned knowledge while learning new tasks. Neural networks, in particular, suffer plenty…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2019-03-15 Soheil Kolouri , Nicholas Ketz , Xinyun Zou , Jeffrey Krichmar , Praveen Pilly

Learning is based on synaptic plasticity, which affects and is driven by neural activity. Because pre- and postsynaptic spiking activity is shaped by randomness, the synaptic weights follow a stochastic process, requiring a probabilistic…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2026-01-14 Jakob Stubenrauch , Naomi Auer , Richard Kempter , Benjamin Lindner

In typical reinforcement learning (RL), the environment is assumed given and the goal of the learning is to identify an optimal policy for the agent taking actions through its interactions with the environment. In this paper, we extend this…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-10-25 Haifeng Zhang , Jun Wang , Zhiming Zhou , Weinan Zhang , Ying Wen , Yong Yu , Wenxin Li

An ongoing challenge in neural information processing is: how do neurons adjust their connectivity to improve task performance over time (i.e., actualize learning)? It is widely believed that there is a consistent, synaptic-level learning…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Aman Bhargava , Mohammad R. Rezaei , Milad Lankarany

Reinforcement learning agents need exploratory behaviors to escape from local optima. These behaviors may include both immediate dithering perturbation and temporally consistent exploration. To achieve these, a stochastic policy model that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-12-27 Sirui Xie , Junning Huang , Lanxin Lei , Chunxiao Liu , Zheng Ma , Wei Zhang , Liang Lin

Plasticity Loss is an increasingly important phenomenon that refers to the empirical observation that as a neural network is continually trained on a sequence of changing tasks, its ability to adapt to a new task diminishes over time. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Vivek F. Farias , Adam D. Jozefiak

The evolution of the human brain has led to the development of complex synaptic plasticity, enabling dynamic adaptation to a constantly evolving world. This progress inspires our exploration into a new paradigm for Spiking Neural Networks…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2024-02-02 Guobin Shen , Dongcheng Zhao , Yiting Dong , Yang Li , Feifei Zhao , Yi Zeng

Identifying statistical regularities in solutions to some tasks in multi-task reinforcement learning can accelerate the learning of new tasks. Skill learning offers one way of identifying these regularities by decomposing pre-collected…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-12 Yiding Jiang , Evan Zheran Liu , Benjamin Eysenbach , Zico Kolter , Chelsea Finn

We study the characteristics of weak signal detection by a recurrent neuronal network with plastic synaptic coupling. It is shown that in the presence of an asynchronous component in synaptic transmission, the network acquires selectivity…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2015-05-13 Vladislav Volman , Herbert Levine

Deep reinforcement learning has great potential to acquire complex, adaptive behaviors for autonomous agents automatically. However, the underlying neural network polices have not been widely deployed in real-world applications, especially…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-06-04 Tingxiang Fan , Pinxin Long , Wenxi Liu , Jia Pan , Ruigang Yang , Dinesh Manocha