Neuronal Activity in the Rodent Dorsal Striatum in Sequential Navigation: Separation of Spatial and Reward Responses on the Multiple T Task

2004 ◽  
Vol 91 (5) ◽  
pp. 2259-2272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil Schmitzer-Torbert ◽  
A. David Redish

The striatum plays an important role in “habitual” learning and memory and has been hypothesized to implement a reinforcement-learning algorithm to select actions to perform given the current sensory input. Many experimental approaches to striatal activity have made use of temporally structured tasks, which imply that the striatal representation is temporal. To test this assumption, we recorded neurons in the dorsal striatum of rats running a sequential navigation task: the multiple T maze. Rats navigated a sequence of four T maze turns to receive food rewards delivered in two locations. The responses of neurons that fired phasically were examined. Task-responsive phasic neurons were active as rats ran on the maze (maze-responsive) or during reward receipt (reward-responsive). Neither mazenor reward-responsive neurons encoded simple motor commands: maze-responses were not well correlated with the shape of the rat's path and most reward-responsive neurons did not fire at similar rates at both food-delivery sites. Maze-responsive neurons were active at one or more locations on the maze, but these responses did not cluster at spatial landmarks such as turns. Across sessions the activity of maze-responsive neurons was highly correlated when rats ran the same maze. Maze-responses encoded the location of the rat on the maze and imply a spatial representation in the striatum in a task with prominent spatial demands. Maze-responsive and reward-responsive neurons were two separate populations, suggesting a divergence in striatal information processing of navigation and reward.

Symmetry ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 471
Author(s):  
Jai Hoon Park ◽  
Kang Hoon Lee

Designing novel robots that can cope with a specific task is a challenging problem because of the enormous design space that involves both morphological structures and control mechanisms. To this end, we present a computational method for automating the design of modular robots. Our method employs a genetic algorithm to evolve robotic structures as an outer optimization, and it applies a reinforcement learning algorithm to each candidate structure to train its behavior and evaluate its potential learning ability as an inner optimization. The size of the design space is reduced significantly by evolving only the robotic structure and by performing behavioral optimization using a separate training algorithm compared to that when both the structure and behavior are evolved simultaneously. Mutual dependence between evolution and learning is achieved by regarding the mean cumulative rewards of a candidate structure in the reinforcement learning as its fitness in the genetic algorithm. Therefore, our method searches for prospective robotic structures that can potentially lead to near-optimal behaviors if trained sufficiently. We demonstrate the usefulness of our method through several effective design results that were automatically generated in the process of experimenting with actual modular robotics kit.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Morales ◽  
Rajmonda Sulo Caceres ◽  
Tina Eliassi-Rad

AbstractComplex networks are often either too large for full exploration, partially accessible, or partially observed. Downstream learning tasks on these incomplete networks can produce low quality results. In addition, reducing the incompleteness of the network can be costly and nontrivial. As a result, network discovery algorithms optimized for specific downstream learning tasks given resource collection constraints are of great interest. In this paper, we formulate the task-specific network discovery problem as a sequential decision-making problem. Our downstream task is selective harvesting, the optimal collection of vertices with a particular attribute. We propose a framework, called network actor critic (NAC), which learns a policy and notion of future reward in an offline setting via a deep reinforcement learning algorithm. The NAC paradigm utilizes a task-specific network embedding to reduce the state space complexity. A detailed comparative analysis of popular network embeddings is presented with respect to their role in supporting offline planning. Furthermore, a quantitative study is presented on various synthetic and real benchmarks using NAC and several baselines. We show that offline models of reward and network discovery policies lead to significantly improved performance when compared to competitive online discovery algorithms. Finally, we outline learning regimes where planning is critical in addressing sparse and changing reward signals.


2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 417-428
Author(s):  
Yanyan Dai ◽  
KiDong Lee ◽  
SukGyu Lee

For real applications, rotary inverted pendulum systems have been known as the basic model in nonlinear control systems. If researchers have no deep understanding of control, it is difficult to control a rotary inverted pendulum platform using classic control engineering models, as shown in section 2.1. Therefore, without classic control theory, this paper controls the platform by training and testing reinforcement learning algorithm. Many recent achievements in reinforcement learning (RL) have become possible, but there is a lack of research to quickly test high-frequency RL algorithms using real hardware environment. In this paper, we propose a real-time Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) control system to train and test the deep reinforcement learning algorithm from simulation to real hardware implementation. The Double Deep Q-Network (DDQN) with prioritized experience replay reinforcement learning algorithm, without a deep understanding of classical control engineering, is used to implement the agent. For the real experiment, to swing up the rotary inverted pendulum and make the pendulum smoothly move, we define 21 actions to swing up and balance the pendulum. Comparing Deep Q-Network (DQN), the DDQN with prioritized experience replay algorithm removes the overestimate of Q value and decreases the training time. Finally, this paper shows the experiment results with comparisons of classic control theory and different reinforcement learning algorithms.


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