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John Vastola

3 accepted papers

2025

Deep RL Needs Deep Behavior Analysis: Exploring Implicit Planning by Model-Free Agents in Open-Ended Environments

NeurIPS 2025poster

Understanding the behavior of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents—particularly as task and agent sophistication increase—requires more than simple comparison of reward curves, yet standard methods for behavioral analysis remain underdeveloped in DRL. We apply tools from neuroscience and etholog…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

Gradient Descent as Loss Landscape Navigation: a Normative Framework for Deriving Learning Rules

NeurIPS 2025poster

Learning rules—prescriptions for updating model parameters to improve performance—are typically assumed rather than derived. Why do some learning rules work better than others, and under what assumptions can a given rule be considered optimal? We propose a theoretical framework that casts learning r…

Cited by 0SourceScholar