8 papers
Implications of hierarchical Markov models of behavior: on irreversibility, predictability, and dimensionality
John J. Vastola, Kanaka Rajan
The maturation of quantitative tools for studying the high-level structure of animal behavior, and especially tools which represent spontaneous behavior as a sequence of stereotype…
Deep RL Needs Deep Behavior Analysis: Exploring Implicit Planning by Model-Free Agents in Open-Ended Environments
Riley Simmons-Edler, Ryan P. Badman, Felix Baastad Berg +5
Understanding the behavior of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents -particularly as task and agent sophistication increase- requires more than simple comparison of reward curve…
A Variational Manifold Embedding Framework for Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction
John J. Vastola, Samuel J. Gershman, Kanaka Rajan
Dimensionality reduction algorithms like principal component analysis (PCA) are workhorses of machine learning and neuroscience, but each has well-known limitations. Variants of PC…
Gradient Descent as Loss Landscape Navigation: a Normative Framework for Deriving Learning Rules
John J. Vastola, Samuel J. Gershman, Kanaka Rajan
Learning rules -- prescriptions for updating model parameters to improve performance -- are typically assumed rather than derived. Why do some learning rules work better than other…
Generalization through variance: how noise shapes inductive biases in diffusion models
John J. Vastola
How diffusion models generalize beyond their training set is not known, and is somewhat mysterious given two facts: the optimum of the denoising score matching (DSM) objective usua…
Optimal packing of attractor states in neural representations
John J. Vastola
Animals' internal states reflect variables like their position in space, orientation, decisions, and motor actions -- but how should these internal states be arranged? Internal sta…