From Eye-blinks to State Construction: Diagnostic Benchmarks for Online Representation Learning

Understand

We present three new diagnostic prediction problems inspired by classical-conditioning experiments to facilitate research in online prediction learning.

• Experiments in classical conditioning show that animals such as rabbits, pigeons, and dogs can make long temporal associations that enable multi-step prediction.
• To replicate this remarkable ability, an agent must construct an internal state representation that summarizes its interaction history.
• Recurrent neural networks can automatically construct state and learn temporal associations.