An algorithm that learns through rewards may show how our brain does too

In reinforcement learning problems, significant improvement has been found from approximating the distribution of rewards for a particular action, rather than just estimating the mean reward.

DeepMind's research suggests that a similar model is at work in the brains of mice, mediated by dopamine. Each neuron has a different level of optimism/pessimism when interpreting new data, which leads them to capture different part of the reward distribution. Roughly, one neuron will converge on the 20th percentile reward, while another converges on the 90th percentile (technically, each neuron tracks an expectile rather than a percentile, but the intuition is the same).

This is a significant break from the previous model, which said that all dopamine neurons roughly just estimate the mean.

Hi Will, thanks for the reply. One thing I'm curious about: this paper discusses how a neuron that uses a different slope for positive and negative updates will converge to an expectile of the reward distribution. And the behavior is very interpretable, in that a slope of 3 for negative updates and a slope of 2 for positive updates will lead the neuron to converge to the 60th expectile (3 / 3+2) if my understanding is correct.

But it seems that the more common approach in reinforcement learning is to estimate quantiles via regression rather than to get expectiles via asymmetric updates as in mice neurons. Do you have intuition for why this performs better? And is there an analog to the asymmetrically updating neuron in the quantile case?

Hi, thanks for posting the news story.

We can think about asymmetric regression more generally. If you have an error and apply some 'response' function f to that error you change the estimator you learn. In the case of quantile regression f is a sign function, expectile regression it is identity.

In my opinion, and this is entirely speculation, I think with further experiments more completely studying the effect we found in our paper, that we will find the response function (f) in the brain is not linear, but a type of saturating function like if we smoothed the sign function out. We repeated our experiments in the paper using such a function, which has been proposed for dopamine neuron responses before, and the analysis continues to hold because the rewards are all quite small and likely simply in the linear region of a non-linear response function (we know firing rate saturates eventually so this isn't much of a surprise).

Regarding quantiles being more commonly used, it's actually the other way around. The Huber-quantiles we saw perform best in the QR-DQN paper, and which most often get used in the follow-on RL work, are actually more like the type of saturating non-linearity you might expect in the brain (although the Huber loss is not as smooth as you probably would expect the neuron response to be).