🧠 Brains 💨 Beat 🤖 AI at 🏃♂️ Fast Learning 📚 Due to 🗺 Structured Exploration 🌐
Our biological 🧠 brains have an advantage over 🤖 AI when it comes to 🚀 rapid learning, all because of the way 🐾 animals explore their environment 🌲🌳! By understanding the brain's learning 📚 algorithms, scientists hope to develop AI agents that can learn 🎓 faster with less experience 💡.
In a recent study 📖, researchers found that animals' 🐾 directed exploration 🌐 is more efficient than the random 🔀 exploration shown by AI agents. Animals can learn an environment 🌳 in less than 🔟 minutes, while AI agents need thousands of experiences 🔄 to do the same. This discovery 🔍 emphasizes the need for better learning algorithms that can replicate the behavior of animals when exploring 🗺 and learning their surroundings 🏞.
At the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre 🏢 and Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at UCL, neuroscientists 🔬 discovered that animals' exploratory actions 🏃♂️, like darting quickly towards objects, are purposeful 🎯 and help them learn their environment efficiently 🌐. In a paper 📄 published in Neuron, the researchers tested whether simply observing 👀 obstacles was enough for animals to learn about them, or if these purposeful actions were necessary for building a cognitive map 🗺.
When animals were prevented 🚫 from performing exploratory runs 🏃♂️ using optogenetic tools 🔦, they didn't learn their environment, even if they spent a lot of time ⌛ observing and sniffing 👃 obstacles. This finding 🔍 shows that the instinctive exploratory actions themselves help animals learn a map 🗺 of their surroundings 🌎.
By studying different reinforcement learning models 💡 used in artificial agents, the researchers found that a combo 🤝 of model-free and model-based algorithms could potentially explain animal behavior 🐾. Although this may not be how the animal brain works 🧠, it helps scientists understand what's required in a learning algorithm 📚.
The next steps for the research team 🔬 include investigating the connection 🔗 between the execution of exploratory actions 🏃♂️ and the representation of subgoals 🎯 in the brain. They will carry out brain recordings 🧠🎙️ to identify which areas are involved in representing subgoals and how exploratory actions lead to the formation of these representations 🗺.