The gray agent consistently chooses the cyan object over the yellow object (a) . The same gray agent moves to the preferred cyan object (b).

Learning shared structure across environments facilitates rapid learning and adaptive behavior in neural systems. This has been widely demonstrated and applied in machine learning to train models that are capable of generalizing to novel settings. However, there has been limited work exploiting the shared structure in neural activity during similar tasks for learning latent dynamics from neural recordings. Existing approaches are designed to infer dynamics from a single dataset and cannot be readily adapted to account for statistical heterogeneities across recordings. In this work, we hypothesize that similar tasks admit a corresponding family of related solutions and propose a novel approach for meta-learning this solution space from task-related neural activity of trained animals. Specifically, we capture the variabilities across recordings on a low-dimensional manifold which concisely parametrizes this family of dynamics, thereby facilitating rapid learning of latent dynamics given new recordings. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on few-shot reconstruction and forecasting of synthetic dynamical systems, and neural recordings from the motor cortex during different arm reaching tasks.

While UWB-based methods can achieve high localization accuracy in small-scale areas, their accuracy and reliability are significantly challenged in large-scale environments. In this paper, we propose a learning-based framework named ULOC for Ultra-Wideband (UWB) based localization in such complex large-scale environments. First, anchors are deployed in the environment without knowledge of their actual position. Then, UWB observations are collected when the vehicle travels in the environment. At the same time, map-consistent pose estimates are developed from registering (onboard self-localization) data with the prior map to provide the training labels. We then propose a network based on MAMBA that learns the ranging patterns of UWBs over a complex large-scale environment. The experiment demonstrates that our solution can ensure high localization accuracy on a large scale compared to the state-of-the-art. We release our source code to benefit the community at https://github.com/brytsknguyen/uloc.

Subjective expected utility theory assumes that decision-makers possess unlimited computational resources to reason about their choices; however, virtually all decisions in everyday life are made under resource constraints--i.e.

We propose the Intuitive Reasoning Network (IRENE) - a novel neural model for intuitive psychological reasoning about agents' goals, preferences, and actions that can generalise previous experiences to new situations. IRENE combines a graph neural network for learning agent and world state representations with a transformer to encode the task context. When evaluated on the challenging Baby Intuitions Benchmark, IRENE achieves new state-of-the-art performance on three out of its five tasks - with up to 48.9% improvement. In contrast to existing methods, IRENE is able to bind preferences to specific agents, to better distinguish between rational and irrational agents, and to better understand the role of blocking obstacles. We also investigate, for the first time, the influence of the training tasks on test performance. Our analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of IRENE in combining prior knowledge gained during training for unseen evaluation tasks.

Recent experimental observations have shown that the reactivation of hippocampal place cells (PC) during sleep or immobility depicts trajectories that can go around barriers and can flexibly adapt to a changing maze layout. Such layout-conforming replay sheds a light on how the activity of place cells supports the learning of flexible navigation of an animal in a dynamically changing maze. However, existing computational models of replay fall short of generating layout-conforming replay, restricting their usage to simple environments, like linear tracks or open fields. In this paper, we propose a computational model that generates layout-conforming replay and explains how such replay drives the learning of flexible navigation in a maze. First, we propose a Hebbian-like rule to learn the inter-PC synaptic strength during exploring a maze. Then we use a continuous attractor network (CAN) with feedback inhibition to model the interaction among place cells and hippocampal interneurons. The activity bump of place cells drifts along a path in the maze, which models layout-conforming replay. During replay in rest, the synaptic strengths from place cells to striatal medium spiny neurons (MSN) are learned by a novel dopamine-modulated three-factor rule to store place-reward associations. During goal-directed navigation, the CAN periodically generates replay trajectories from the animal's location for path planning, and the trajectory leading to a maximal MSN activity is followed by the animal. We have implemented our model into a high-fidelity virtual rat in the MuJoCo physics simulator. Extensive experiments have demonstrated that its superior flexibility during navigation in a maze is due to a continuous re-learning of inter-PC and PC-MSN synaptic strength.

To facilitate the development of new models to bridge the gap between machine and human social intelligence, the recently proposed Baby Intuitions Benchmark (arXiv:2102.11938) provides a suite of tasks designed to evaluate commonsense reasoning about agents' goals and actions that even young infants exhibit. Here we present a principled Bayesian solution to this benchmark, based on a hierarchically Bayesian Theory of Mind (HBToM). By including hierarchical priors on agent goals and dispositions, inference over our HBToM model enables few-shot learning of the efficiency and preferences of an agent, which can then be used in commonsense plausibility judgements about subsequent agent behavior. This approach achieves near-perfect accuracy on most benchmark tasks, outperforming deep learning and imitation learning baselines while producing interpretable human-like inferences, demonstrating the advantages of structured Bayesian models of human social cognition.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) involves the use of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) to make sequential decisions in order to maximize reward. For many tasks the resulting sequence of actions produced by a Deep RL policy can be long and difficult to understand for humans. A crucial component of human explanations is selectivity, whereby only key decisions and causes are recounted. Imbuing Deep RL agents with such an ability would make their resulting policies easier to understand from a human perspective and generate a concise set of instructions to aid the learning of future agents. To this end we use a Deep RL agent with an episodic memory system to identify and recount key decisions during policy execution. We show that these decisions form a short, human readable explanation that can also be used to speed up the learning of naive Deep RL agents in an algorithm-independent manner.

Humans are expert explorers. Understanding the computational cognitive mechanisms that support this efficiency can advance the study of the human mind and enable more efficient exploration algorithms. We hypothesize that humans explore new environments efficiently by inferring the structure of unobserved spaces using spatial information collected from previously explored spaces. This cognitive process can be modeled computationally using program induction in a Hierarchical Bayesian framework that explicitly reasons about uncertainty with strong spatial priors. Using a new behavioral Map Induction Task, we demonstrate that this computational framework explains human exploration behavior better than non-inductive models and outperforms state-of-the-art planning algorithms when applied to a realistic spatial navigation domain.