Exploration Biases for Task Learning In Machines and Animals

Manuel Lopes

INRIA, Bordeaux
Tuesday, November 17, 2015 at 12:00am
560 Evans Hall

Curiosity is very predominant in people and many animals, but its mechanisms are poorly understood. Motivated by research on neuroscience and child development we want to develop methods to understand those mechanims and provide machines with adaptation capabilities similar to the ones of animals. Our model includes exploration biases such as reward, information, learning progress and reward antecipation. We show that only the combination those biases can explain the observed empirical data. We also show how exploration biases based on learning progress can improve robustness to lack of knowledge about a domain and its robustness to environmental changes.