Topic: long-term planning

Cognitive maps are abstract internal representations of the external world that facilitate planning and efficient navigation. How the brain learns such maps from variable sensory experience remains elusive. Previous models either relied on discrete environments [1], linear embeddings of continuous states [2], or generative models trained by predicting sensory input [3]. However, the world is neither discrete nor linear, and the brain presumably does not learn a generative model of its sensory inputs. So, how can the brain learn a map and use it to plan strategically? In this work, we develop