@magdalenasabat.bsky.social used 🔌 ephys to show that ferret auditory cortex neurons integrate sounds within fixed windows (~15–150 ms) that increase in non-primary auditory cortex, independent of information rate.
▶️ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
#Neuroscience

Link to the preprint:
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Questions or thoughts? Let’s discuss!
Reach out — we’d love to hear from you! 🙌

Why does it matter? 🤔
Our work aims at bridging cognitive science and machine learning, showing how human-inspired principles like reward normalization can improve reinforcement learning AI systems!

What about Deep Decision Trees? 🌳
We further extend the RA model by integrating a temporal difference component to the dynamic range updates. With this extension, we demonstrate that the magnitude invariance capabilities of the RA model persist in multi-step tasks.

With this enhanced model, we generalize the main findings to other bandit settings: The dynamic RA model outperforms the ABS model in several bandit tasks with noisy outcomes, non-stationary rewards, and even multiple options.

Once these basic properties are demonstrated in a simplified set-up, we enhance the RA model to successfully cope with stochastic and volatile environments, by dynamically adjusting its internal range variables (Rmax / Rmin).

In contrast, the RA model, by constraining all rewards to a similar scale, efficiently balances exploration and exploitation without the need for task-specific adjustment!

Crucially, modifying the value of the temperature (𝛽) from the Softmax function does not solve the problem of the standard model. It simply shifts the peak performance along the magnitude axis.
Thus, to achieve high performance, the ABS model requires tuning the 𝛽 value to the magnitudes at stake.

Agent-Level Insights: ABS performance drops to chance due to over-exploration in small rewards and over-exploitation in large rewards.
In contrast, the RA model maintains a consistent, scale-invariant performance.

First, we simulate ABS and RA behavior in bandits tasks with various magnitude and discriminability levels.

As expected the standard model is highly dependent on the tasks levels, while the RA model achieves high accuracy over the whole range of values tested!

To avoid magnitude-dependence, we propose the Range-Adapted (RA) model: RA normalizes rewards, enabling consistent representation of subjective values within a constrained space, independent of reward magnitude.

Standard reinforcement learning algorithms encode rewards in an unbiased, absolute manner (ABS), which make their performance magnitude-dependent.

This work was done in collaboration with Jérémy Pérez, under the supervision of @stepalminteri.bsky.social 👥

Let's now dive into the study!