Introducing Neuromodulation in Deep Neural Networks to Learn Adaptive Behaviours

In this paper, we propose a new deep neural network architecture, called NMD net, that has been specifically designed to learn adaptive behaviours. This architecture exploits a biological mechanism called neuromodulation that sustains adaptation in biological organisms. This architecture has been introduced in a deep-reinforcement learning architecture for interacting with Markov decision processes in a meta-reinforcement learning setting where the action space is continuous. The deep-reinforcement learning architecture is trained using an advantage actor-critic algorithm. Experiments are carried on several test problems. Results show that the neural network architecture with neuromodulation provides significantly better results than state-of-the-art recurrent neural networks which do not exploit this mechanism.