Review for NeurIPS paper: Inverse Rational Control with Partially Observable Continuous Nonlinear Dynamics

Neural Information Processing Systems 

Weaknesses: The specific empirical evaluation chosen is the primary weakness of the paper. From a neuroscience perspective, the validation of parameter recovery on synthetic data is a necessary first step, but not a sufficient one. Given that [a] the task is primarily of neuroscientific interest and [b] a simpler (though also bayesian belief-updating) fit model is given in the cited prior work, the lack of comparison of cross-validated performance against that prior model is surprising. We should either see better cross-validation performance to the models in prior work, or similar performance but more insight / explanation of the underlying mental computation. This would show us a real payoff of the new insights here.