Balancing New Against Old Information: The Role of Surprise in Learning

Mohammadjavad Faraji; Kerstin Preuschoff; Wulfram Gerstner

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arXiv · 1606.05642

Balancing New Against Old Information: The Role of Surprise in Learning

Mohammadjavad Faraji·Kerstin Preuschoff·Wulfram Gerstner

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Abstract

Surprise describes a range of phenomena from unexpected events to behavioral responses. We propose a measure of surprise and use it for surprise-driven learning. Our surprise measure takes into account data likelihood as well as the degree of commitment to a belief via the entropy of the belief distribution. We find that surprise-minimizing learning dynamically adjusts the balance between new and old information without the need of knowledge about the temporal statistics of the environment. We apply our framework to a dynamic decision-making task and a maze exploration task. Our surprise minimizing framework is suitable for learning in complex environments, even if the environment undergoes gradual or sudden changes and could eventually provide a framework to study the behavior of humans and animals encountering surprising events.

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BibTeX RIS

Mohammadjavad Faraji, Kerstin Preuschoff, Wulfram Gerstner. 2016-06-17. Balancing New Against Old Information: The Role of Surprise in Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05642

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