Temporal-Difference Learning Using Distributed Error Signals

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Guan, Jonas, Verch, Shon Eduard, Voelcker, Claas, Jackson, Ethan C., Papernot, Nicolas, Cunningham, William A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Guan, Jonas
Verch, Shon Eduard
Voelcker, Claas
Jackson, Ethan C.
Papernot, Nicolas
Cunningham, William A.
author_facet Guan, Jonas
Verch, Shon Eduard
Voelcker, Claas
Jackson, Ethan C.
Papernot, Nicolas
Cunningham, William A.
contents A computational problem in biological reward-based learning is how credit assignment is performed in the nucleus accumbens (NAc). Much research suggests that NAc dopamine encodes temporal-difference (TD) errors for learning value predictions. However, dopamine is synchronously distributed in regionally homogeneous concentrations, which does not support explicit credit assignment (like used by backpropagation). It is unclear whether distributed errors alone are sufficient for synapses to make coordinated updates to learn complex, nonlinear reward-based learning tasks. We design a new deep Q-learning algorithm, Artificial Dopamine, to computationally demonstrate that synchronously distributed, per-layer TD errors may be sufficient to learn surprisingly complex RL tasks. We empirically evaluate our algorithm on MinAtar, the DeepMind Control Suite, and classic control tasks, and show it often achieves comparable performance to deep RL algorithms that use backpropagation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_03604
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Temporal-Difference Learning Using Distributed Error Signals
Guan, Jonas
Verch, Shon Eduard
Voelcker, Claas
Jackson, Ethan C.
Papernot, Nicolas
Cunningham, William A.
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
A computational problem in biological reward-based learning is how credit assignment is performed in the nucleus accumbens (NAc). Much research suggests that NAc dopamine encodes temporal-difference (TD) errors for learning value predictions. However, dopamine is synchronously distributed in regionally homogeneous concentrations, which does not support explicit credit assignment (like used by backpropagation). It is unclear whether distributed errors alone are sufficient for synapses to make coordinated updates to learn complex, nonlinear reward-based learning tasks. We design a new deep Q-learning algorithm, Artificial Dopamine, to computationally demonstrate that synchronously distributed, per-layer TD errors may be sufficient to learn surprisingly complex RL tasks. We empirically evaluate our algorithm on MinAtar, the DeepMind Control Suite, and classic control tasks, and show it often achieves comparable performance to deep RL algorithms that use backpropagation.
title Temporal-Difference Learning Using Distributed Error Signals
topic Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.03604