Seminar · Computational Neuroscience
What is So Interesting About Reinforcement Learning?
Andrew Barto · University of Massachusetts Amherst
Wed, Oct 29, 2025 · 15:00 UTC
This talk aims to answer these questions along four dimensions. First is history. RL was the basis of AI long before the term AI was introduced in 1956. The first machine learning (ML) systems were based on RL even before digital computers existed. Despite notable early successes of ML based on RL, RL essentially disappeared from ML until relatively recently. A second reason for renewed interest in RL is the clarification of some misunderstandings that have been prevalent in the ML community. A third, and most important, reason for this resurgence is that new, or rediscovered, algorithms and