Why Do Animals Need Shaping? A Theory of Task Composition and Curriculum Learning

Understand

Diverse studies in systems neuroscience begin with extended periods of curriculum training known as `shaping' procedures.

• These involve progressively studying component parts of more complex tasks, and can make the difference between learning a task quickly, slowly or not at all.
• Despite the importance of shaping to the acquisition of complex tasks, there is as yet no theory that can help guide the design of shaping procedures, or more fundamentally, provide insight into its key role in learning.
• Modern deep reinforcement learning systems might implicitly learn compositional primitives within their multilayer policy networks.