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
Spring 2025 Schedule
February 6 Tarun Kamath (Sabatini Lab | Research Talk: "Dopamine signaling in the tail of striatum integrates internal state to guide novelty exploration")
February 20 No meeting
March 6 Kevin Mizes (Harvey Lab / Olveczky Lab | Research Talk: "Motor flexibility and automaticity in 'piano playing' rats")
March 20 No meeting
April 3 Ching Fang (Rajan Lab | Research Talk: "Strategies for Fast Learning in Animal Navigation: A Meta-RL Perspective")
April 17 Sonja Johnson-Yu (Rajan Lab | Research Talk: "Active Electrosensing in Artificial Fish Collectives")
May 8 Jonathan Kasdin (Gadagkar Lab | Research Talk)
May 22 Jaeeon Lee (Uchida Lab | Research Talk)
Fall 2024 Schedule
September 12 Zhang-Wei Hong (Agrawal Lab | Research Talk: "Reconciling Heuristic with Reinforcement Learning via Constrained Optimization: Algorithms and Applications")
September 26 Mark Burrell (Uchida Lab | Research Talk: "Explaining the effect of contingency on dopamine and behavior with temporal difference learning")
October 10 Allison Hamilos (Whitehead Fellow | Research Talk: "Linking learning and movement initiation")
October 24 Eleanor Brown (Howe Lab | Research Talk: "Striatal dopamine release encodes trajectory errors expressed along a spatial gradient distinct from cue-based reward prediction errors")
November 14 Jieyu Zheng (Meister Lab | Research Talk: "Cognition and Cortex: Implications from Rapid learning, Long-term Memory, and Flexible Routing in Rodent Maze Navigation")
December 5 Aaron Walsman (Kempner Fellow | Research Talk: "The Problem With Other People") [ 2 PM to 3:30 PM !!! ]
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)