States as goal-directed concepts: an epistemic approach to state-representation learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Amir, Nadav, Niv, Yael, Langdon, Angela
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2023
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author Amir, Nadav
Niv, Yael
Langdon, Angela
author_facet Amir, Nadav
Niv, Yael
Langdon, Angela
contents Our goals fundamentally shape how we experience the world. For example, when we are hungry, we tend to view objects in our environment according to whether or not they are edible (or tasty). Alternatively, when we are cold, we may view the very same objects according to their ability to produce heat. Computational theories of learning in cognitive systems, such as reinforcement learning, use the notion of "state-representation" to describe how agents decide which features of their environment are behaviorally-relevant and which can be ignored. However, these approaches typically assume "ground-truth" state representations that are known by the agent, and reward functions that need to be learned. Here we suggest an alternative approach in which state-representations are not assumed veridical, or even pre-defined, but rather emerge from the agent's goals through interaction with its environment. We illustrate this novel perspective by inferring the goals driving rat behavior in an odor-guided choice task and discuss its implications for developing, from first principles, an information-theoretic account of goal-directed state representation learning and behavior.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_02367
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle States as goal-directed concepts: an epistemic approach to state-representation learning
Amir, Nadav
Niv, Yael
Langdon, Angela
Neurons and Cognition
Information Theory
Our goals fundamentally shape how we experience the world. For example, when we are hungry, we tend to view objects in our environment according to whether or not they are edible (or tasty). Alternatively, when we are cold, we may view the very same objects according to their ability to produce heat. Computational theories of learning in cognitive systems, such as reinforcement learning, use the notion of "state-representation" to describe how agents decide which features of their environment are behaviorally-relevant and which can be ignored. However, these approaches typically assume "ground-truth" state representations that are known by the agent, and reward functions that need to be learned. Here we suggest an alternative approach in which state-representations are not assumed veridical, or even pre-defined, but rather emerge from the agent's goals through interaction with its environment. We illustrate this novel perspective by inferring the goals driving rat behavior in an odor-guided choice task and discuss its implications for developing, from first principles, an information-theoretic account of goal-directed state representation learning and behavior.
title States as goal-directed concepts: an epistemic approach to state-representation learning
topic Neurons and Cognition
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.02367