instruction:
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.
question:
We study the role of intrinsic motivation as an exploration bias for reinforcement learning in sparse-reward synergistic tasks, which are tasks where multiple agents must work together to achieve a goal they could not individually. Our key idea is that a good guiding principle for intrinsic motivation in synergistic tasks is to take actions which affect the world in ways that would not be achieved if the agents were acting on their own. Thus, we propose to incentivize agents to take (joint) actions whose effects cannot be predicted via a composition of the predicted effect for each individual agent. We study two instantiations of this idea, one based on the true states encountered, and another based on a dynamics model trained concurrently with the policy. While the former is simpler, the latter has the benefit of being analytically differentiable with respect to the action taken. We validate our approach in robotic bimanual manipulation tasks with sparse rewards; we find that our approach yields more efficient learning than both 1) training with only the sparse reward and 2) using the typical surprise-based formulation of intrinsic motivation, which does not bias toward synergistic behavior. Videos are available on the project webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/iclr2020-synergistic.
answer:
We propose a formulation of intrinsic motivation that is suitable as an exploration bias in multi-agent sparse-reward synergistic tasks, by encouraging agents to affect the world in ways that would not be achieved if they were acting individually.


question:
In this paper we present the first freely available dataset for the development and evaluation of domain adaptation methods, for the sound event detection task. The dataset contains 40 log mel-band energies extracted from $100$ different synthetic sound event tracks, with additive noise from nine different acoustic scenes (from indoor, outdoor, and vehicle environments), mixed at six different sound-to-noise ratios, SNRs, (from -12 to -27 dB with a step of -3 dB), and totaling to 5400 (9 * 100 * 6) sound files and a total length of 30 564 minutes. We provide the dataset as is, the code to re-create the dataset and remix the sound event tracks and the acoustic scenes with different SNRs, and a baseline method that tests the adaptation performance with the proposed dataset and establishes some first results.
answer:
The very first freely available domain adaptation dataset for sound event detection.


question:
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.
answer:

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