RL and the brain seminar @ HMS

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 * (irregular dates in Nov/Dec)

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)