Related papers: Thalamocortical contribution to solving credit ass…
Neuroscientific evidence shows that for most brain networks all pathways between cortical regions either pass through the thalamus or a transthalamic parallel route exists for any direct corticocortical connection. This paper seeks to…
Credit assignment problems, for example policy evaluation in RL, often require bootstrapping prediction errors through preceding states \textit{or} maintaining temporally extended memory traces; solutions which are unfavourable or…
In a sequential decision-making problem, having a structural dependency amongst the reward distributions associated with the arms makes it challenging to identify a subset of alternatives that guarantees the optimal collective outcome.…
Designing reward functions for efficiently guiding reinforcement learning (RL) agents toward specific behaviors is a complex task. This is challenging since it requires the identification of reward structures that are not sparse and that…
The neuronal circuit that controls obsessive and compulsive behaviors involves a complex network of brain regions (some with known involvement in reward processing). Among these are cortical regions, the striatum and the thalamus (which…
In multi-agent environments, agents often struggle to learn optimal policies due to sparse or delayed global rewards, particularly in long-horizon tasks where it is challenging to evaluate actions at intermediate time steps. We introduce…
Neural implicit mapping has emerged as a powerful paradigm for robotic navigation and scene understanding. However, real-world robotic deployment requires continual adaptation to changing environments under strict memory and computation…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms struggle with learning optimal policies for tasks where reward feedback is sparse and depends on a complex sequence of events in the environment. Probabilistic reward machines (PRMs) are finite-state…
It is now widely accepted that one of the roles of the hippocampus is to maintain episodic spatial representations, while parallel striatal pathways contribute to both declarative and procedural value computations by encoding different…
Biological neural networks learn complex behaviors from sparse, delayed feedback using local synaptic plasticity, yet the mechanisms enabling structured credit assignment remain elusive. In contrast, artificial recurrent networks solving…
Neural correlations during a cognitive task are central to study brain information processing and computation. However, they have been poorly analyzed due to the difficulty of recording simultaneous single neurons during task performance.…
Solving the synaptic Credit Assignment Problem(CAP) is central to learning in both biological and artificial neural systems. Finding an optimal solution for synaptic CAP means setting the synaptic weights that assign credit to each neuron…
Recent work, spanning from autonomous vehicle coordination to in-space assembly, has shown the importance of learning collaborative behavior for enabling robots to achieve shared goals. A common approach for learning this cooperative…
The success of deep learning sparked interest in whether the brain learns by using similar techniques for assigning credit to each synaptic weight for its contribution to the network output. However, the majority of current attempts at…
This article presents a simple model of the cortex-basal ganglia-thalamus loop, which is thought to serve for action selection and executions, and reports the results of its implementation. The model is based on the hypothesis that the…
The thalamus is the major gate to the cortex and its control over cortical responses is well established. Cortical feedback to the thalamus is, in turn, the anatomically dominant input to relay cells, yet its influence on thalamic…
State-of-the-art meta reinforcement learning algorithms typically assume the setting of a single agent interacting with its environment in a sequential manner. A negative side-effect of this sequential execution paradigm is that, as the…
The thalamus is the major gate to the cortex and its contribution to cortical receptive field properties is well established. Cortical feedback to the thalamus is, in turn, the anatomically dominant input to relay cells, yet its influence…
The segregated regions of the mammalian cerebral cortex and thalamus form an extensive and complex network, whose structure and function are still only incompletely understood. The present article describes an application of the concepts of…
In order to understand human decision making it is necessary to understand how the brain uses feedback to guide goal-directed behavior. The ventral striatum (VS) appears to be a key structure in this function, responding strongly to…