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 couch-potato problem


Review for NeurIPS paper: See, Hear, Explore: Curiosity via Audio-Visual Association

Neural Information Processing Systems

Weaknesses: My biggest concern with this paper is the treatment of error as reward, or as this paper refers to it, "curiosity by self-supervised prediction." The "couch-potato" issues associated with using error as reward (described in lines 117-121) have been known for decades (e.g., Schmidhuber, 1991, towards the end of Section 3) yet we seem to have to keep re-discovering them. Can you address why it makes sense to use error as reward in your setting despite this problem? It seems particularly concerning since a stated "longer-term goal is to deploy multimodal curiosity on physical robots," a setting with inherent stochasticity. Could you please provide some reasons why you believe that "discovering new sight and sound associations" (lines 122-123) could mitigate the couch-potato problem?