Topic: empirical reinforcement learning objective functions

Although reinforcement learning has been highly successful in training artificial agents to perform a wide variety of complex tasks, the principles governing how animals actually learn to perform new tasks remain poorly understood. While normative approaches have provided profound insights into the design of optimal agents, they often make assumptions that may not be aligned with the sub-optimal learning strategies employed by animals in experimental settings. Even in simplified two-alternate force choice task, mice have shown significant variability in learning dynamics despite highly standar