In this task, you are given the abstract of a research paper. Your task is to generate a summary of this abstract. Your summary should not be very short, but it's better if it's not more than 30 words.

Input: Consider Input: A typical experiment to study cognitive function is to train animals to perform tasks, while the researcher records the electrical activity of the animals neurons. The main obstacle faced, when using this type of electrophysiological experiment to uncover the circuit mechanisms underlying complex behaviors, is our incomplete access to relevant circuits in the brain. One promising approach is to model neural circuits using an artificial neural network (ANN), which can provide complete access to the “neural circuits” responsible for a behavior. More recently, reinforcement learning models have been adopted to understand the functions of cortico-basal ganglia circuits as reward-based learning has been found in mammalian brain. In this paper, we propose a Biologically-plausible Actor-Critic with Episodic Memory (B-ACEM) framework to model a prefrontal cortex-basal ganglia-hippocampus (PFC-BG) circuit, which is verified to capture the behavioral findings from a well-known perceptual decision-making task, i.e., random dots motion discrimination. This B-ACEM framework links neural computation to behaviors, on which we can explore how episodic memory should be considered to govern future decision. Experiments are conducted using different settings of the episodic memory and results show that all patterns of episodic memories can speed up learning. In particular, salient events are prioritized to propagate reward information and guide decisions. Our B-ACEM framework and the built-on experiments give inspirations to both designs for more standard decision-making models in biological system and a more biologically-plausible ANN.

Output: Fast learning via episodic memory verified by a biologically plausible framework for prefrontal cortex-basal ganglia-hippocampus (PFC-BG) circuit


Input: Consider Input: A central capability of intelligent systems is the ability to continuously build upon previous experiences to speed up and enhance learning of new tasks. Two distinct research paradigms have studied this question. Meta-learning views this problem as learning a prior over model parameters that is amenable for fast adaptation on a new task, but typically assumes the set of tasks are available together as a batch. In contrast, online (regret based) learning considers a sequential setting in which problems are revealed one after the other, but conventionally train only a single model without any task-specific adaptation. This work introduces an online meta-learning setting, which merges ideas from both the aforementioned paradigms to better capture the spirit and practice of continual lifelong learning. We propose the follow the meta leader (FTML) algorithm which extends the MAML algorithm to this setting. Theoretically, this work provides an O(logT) regret guarantee for the FTML algorithm. Our experimental evaluation on three different large-scale tasks suggest that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms alternatives based on traditional online learning approaches.

Output: We introduce the online meta learning problem setting to better capture the spirit and practice of continual lifelong learning.


Input: Consider Input: Optimistic initialisation is an effective strategy for efficient exploration in reinforcement learning (RL). In the tabular case, all provably efficient model-free algorithms rely on it. However, model-free deep RL algorithms do not use optimistic initialisation despite taking inspiration from these provably efficient tabular algorithms. In particular, in scenarios with only positive rewards, Q-values are initialised at their lowest possible values due to commonly used network initialisation schemes, a pessimistic initialisation. Merely initialising the network to output optimistic Q-values is not enough, since we cannot ensure that they remain optimistic for novel state-action pairs, which is crucial for exploration. We propose a simple count-based augmentation to pessimistically initialised Q-values that separates the source of optimism from the neural network. We show that this scheme is provably efficient in the tabular setting and extend it to the deep RL setting. Our algorithm, Optimistic Pessimistically Initialised Q-Learning (OPIQ), augments the Q-value estimates of a DQN-based agent with count-derived bonuses to ensure optimism during both action selection and bootstrapping. We show that OPIQ outperforms non-optimistic DQN variants that utilise a pseudocount-based intrinsic motivation in hard exploration tasks, and that it predicts optimistic estimates for novel state-action pairs.


Output: We augment the Q-value estimates with a count-based bonus that ensures optimism during action selection and bootstrapping, even if the Q-value estimates are pessimistic.