Reinforcement learning (RL) is learning by interacting with an environment. An RL agent learns from the consequences of its actions, rather than from being explicitly taught and it selects its actions on basis of its past experiences (exploitation) and also by new choices (exploration), which is essentially trial and error learning. The reinforcement signal that the RL-agent receives is a numerical reward, which encodes the success of an action's outcome, and the agent seeks to learn to select actions that maximize the accumulated reward over time. In general we are following Marr's approach (Marr et al 1982, later re-introduced by Gurney et al 2004) by introducing different levels: the algorithmic, the mechanistic and the implementation level. The best studied case is when RL can be formulated as class of Markov Decision Problems (MDP). The agent can visit a finite number of states and in visiting a state, a numerical reward will be collected, where negative numbers may represent punishments.

In this theoretical contribution we provide mathematical proof that two of the most important classes of network learning - correlation-based differential Hebbian learning and reward-based temporal difference learning - are asymptotically equivalent when timing the learning with a local modulatory signal. This opens the opportunity to consistently reformulate most of the abstract reinforcement learning framework from a correlation based perspective that is more closely related to the biophysics of neurons.

In this theoretical contribution we provide mathematical proof that two of the most important classes of network learning - correlation-based differential Hebbian learning and reward-based temporal difference learning - are asymptotically equivalent when timing the learning with a local modulatory signal. This opens the opportunity to consistently reformulate most of the abstract reinforcement learning framework from a correlation based perspective that is more closely related to the biophysics of neurons.

In this theoretical contribution we provide mathematical proof that two of the most important classes of network learning - correlation-based differential Hebbian learningand reward-based temporal difference learning - are asymptotically equivalent when timing the learning with a local modulatory signal. This opens the opportunity to consistently reformulate most of the abstract reinforcement learning frameworkfrom a correlation based perspective that is more closely related to the biophysics of neurons.