Come hear one of the pioneers in the field!
Reinforcement Learning and Psychology: A Personal Story
1200pm-100pm Thursday, January 23
East Hall 4448
Rich Sutton
Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
University of Alberta
Reinforcement Learning and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
University of Alberta
The modern field of reinforcement learning (RL) has a long, intertwined relationship with psychology. Almost all the powerful ideas of RL came originally from psychology, and today they are recognized as having significantly increased our ability to solve difficult engineering problems such as playing backgammon, flying helicopters, and optimal placement of internet advertisements. Psychology should celebrate this and take credit for it! RL has also begun to give something back to the study of natural minds, as RL algorithms are providing insights into classical conditioning, the neuroscience of brain reward systems, and the role of mental replay in thought. I have been working in the field of RL for much of this journey, back and forth between nature and engineering, and have played a role in some of the key steps. In this talk I tell the story as it seemed to happen from my point of view, summarizing it in four things that I think every psychologist should know about RL: 1) that it is a formalization of learning by trial and error, with engineering uses, 2) that it is a formalization of the propagation of reward predictions which closely matches behavioral and neuroscience data, 3) that it is a formalization of thought as learning from replayed experience that again matches data from natural systems, and 4) that there is a beautiful confluence of psychology, neuroscience, and computational theory on common ideas and elegant algorithms.
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Richard L. Lewis rickl@umich.edu
Professor http://www-personal.umich. edu/~rickl/
Department of Psychology Voice: (734) 763-1466
University of Michigan Fax: (734) 647-9440
530 Church Street Office: East Hall 3018
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1043
Professor http://www-personal.umich.
Department of Psychology Voice: (734) 763-1466
University of Michigan Fax: (734) 647-9440
530 Church Street Office: East Hall 3018
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1043