Structure Learning in Motor Control:A Deep Reinforcement Learning Model

Motor adaptation displays a structure-learning effect: adaptation to a new perturbation occurs more quickly when the subject has prior exposure to perturbations with related structure. Although this `learning-to-learn' effect is well documented, its underlying computational mechanisms are poorly understood. We present a new model of motor structure learning, approaching it from the point of view of deep reinforcement learning. Previous work outside of motor control has shown how recurrent neural networks can account for learning-to-learn effects. We leverage this insight to address motor learning, by importing it into the setting of model-based reinforcement learning. We apply the resulting processing architecture to empirical findings from a landmark study of structure learning in target-directed reaching (Braun et al., 2009), and discuss its implications for a wider range of learning-to-learn phenomena.Comment: 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, to appea

Generating descriptive text from functional brain images

Recent work has shown that it is possible to take brain images of a subject acquired while they saw a scene and reconstruct an approximation of that scene from the images. Here we show that it is also possible to generate _text_ from brain images. We began with images collected as participants read names of objects (e.g., ``Apartment'). Without accessing information about the object viewed for an individual image, we were able to generate from it a collection of semantically pertinent words (e.g., "door," "window"). Across images, the sets of words generated overlapped consistently with those contained in articles about the relevant concepts from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. The technique described, if developed further, could offer an important new tool in building human computer interfaces for use in clinical settings

SCAN: Learning Hierarchical Compositional Visual Concepts

The seemingly infinite diversity of the natural world arises from a relatively small set of coherent rules, such as the laws of physics or chemistry. We conjecture that these rules give rise to regularities that can be discovered through primarily unsupervised experiences and represented as abstract concepts. If such representations are compositional and hierarchical, they can be recombined into an exponentially large set of new concepts. This paper describes SCAN (Symbol-Concept Association Network), a new framework for learning such abstractions in the visual domain. SCAN learns concepts through fast symbol association, grounding them in disentangled visual primitives that are discovered in an unsupervised manner. Unlike state of the art multimodal generative model baselines, our approach requires very few pairings between symbols and images and makes no assumptions about the form of symbol representations. Once trained, SCAN is capable of multimodal bi-directional inference, generating a diverse set of image samples from symbolic descriptions and vice versa. It also allows for traversal and manipulation of the implicit hierarchy of visual concepts through symbolic instructions and learnt logical recombination operations. Such manipulations enable SCAN to break away from its training data distribution and imagine novel visual concepts through symbolically instructed recombination of previously learnt concepts