[Lisa_teatalk] Tea Talk 6 Aug Wednesday @13.00 AA3195 by Dr. Peter Sunehag

Kyung Hyun Cho cho.k.hyun at gmail.com
Mon Aug 4 19:19:23 EDT 2014


Dear all,

We will have a talk this Wednesday by Dr. Peter Sunehag. See below for the
details and the attached paper

Hope to see many of you there!
- Cho

- Speaker: Dr. Peter Sunehag (Australian National University,
http://people.cecs.anu.edu.au/user/1446)
- Date and Time: 6 Aug 2014 @13.00
- Place: AA3195
- Title: Optimism as a fundamental decision-making principle - Abstract:
We discuss the usefulness and rationality of optimism in general sequential
decision making. Humans are often optimistically biased and optimists are
achieving more of their ambitions than more rational people. We provide a
mathematical analysis of general optimistic agents and identify how they
can be better or worse than strictly rational agents. These agents select
the most optimistic among the still plausible hypotheses from a class.
Further, we discuss a milder form of optimism in the case of continuously
parameterized classes. We refer to this setting as reward-modulated
inference, a framework that includes recent models for synaptic weight
updates in neuroscience as a special case.  At the center is a trade-off
between assigning high probability to likable or likely events.  A nice
consequence is that we can formulate generative and discriminative learning
as endpoints of a continuum. Finally, I present some first experiments
using autoencoders for the classical MNIST task showing a very simple way
of getting ok but not state-of-the art accuracy. The aim is not to optimize
narrow tasks maximally but to be able to achieve the law of effect, making
choices with a frequency proportional to past rewards in situations deemed
similar. In really complex tasks this can be a sufficient objective and one
that humans and animals often settle for.  Also, the strategy provides
suitable exploration as well as robustness to change.

>
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