RL and the brain seminar @ HMS
Harvard Medical School's biweekly RL and the brain seminar is a space for trainees to discuss the latest research in reinforcement learning (RL). Of particular interest to the seminar is research related to the neurobiology of RL: for example, how might the activity of midbrain dopaminergic neurons reflect a temporal difference learning algorithm?
* If interested in being added to our email list, please contact John Vastola at john_vastola AT hms.harvard.edu *
When and where? Harvard Medical School, WAB 236, every other Thursday from 12:15 PM to 1:30 PM * (with 1 exception)
Spring 2024 Schedule
January 25 Ryan Badman (Rajan Lab | Research Talk: "Forget and forgive: a neurocognitive mechanism for increased cooperation during group formation") [1:30 to 3 PM !!]
February 8 No meeting
February 22 Ching Fang (Abbott/Aronov Labs | Research Talk: "Predictive auxiliary objectives in deep RL mimic learning in the brain")
March 7 Wilka Carvalho (Kempner Fellow | Research Talk: "Predictive representations: building blocks of intelligence")
March 21 M. Ganesh Kumar (Pehlevan Lab | Research Talk: "Mechanistic and normative models to elucidate neural computations for rapid navigation")
April 4 Caleb Weinreb (Datta Lab | Research Talk: "A seconds-long timescale in naturalistic behavior structures neural dynamics")
April 18 Satpreet Singh (Rajan Lab | Research Talk: "Emergent behaviour and neural dynamics in artificial agents tracking odour plumes")
May 2 Adam Lowet (Uchida Lab | Research Talk: "An opponent striatal circuit for distributional reinforcement learning")
May 16 Malcolm Campbell (Uchida Lab | Research Talk: "Dissecting the circuit basis and global organization of dopamine-driven temporal difference learning in the striatum")
Fall 2023 Schedule
September 20 John Vastola (Drugowitsch Lab | Journal Club: Mesolimbic dopamine release conveys causal associations by Jeong et al.)
October 4 Byron Price (Datta Lab | Journal Club: Optimal policies for Bayesian olfactory search in turbulent flows by Heinonen et al.)
October 18 Xintong Cai (Kaeser Lab | Research Talk: "Moment-to-moment dopamine transmission mechanisms and their role in behavior")
November 1 Jay Hennig (Gershman Lab | Research Talk: "Emergence of belief representations through reinforcement learning", based on this recent paper)
November 15 No meeting due to SFN
November 29 Kimberly Reinhold (Sabatini Lab | Research Talk: "Striatal neural activity underlying incremental learning", based on this recent preprint)