BIMRL: Brain Inspired Meta Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Sample efficiency has been a key issue in reinforcement learning (RL). An efficient agent must be able to leverage its prior experiences to quickly adapt to similar, but new tasks and situations. Meta-RL is one attempt at formalizing and ad-dressing this issue. Inspired by recent progress in meta-RL, we introduce BIMRL, a novel multi-layer architecture along with a novel brain-inspired memory module that will help agents quickly adapt to new tasks within a few episodes. We also utilize this memory module to design a novel intrinsic reward that will guide the agent's exploration. Our architecture is inspired by findings in cognitive neuroscience and is compatible with the knowledge on connectivity and functionality of different regions in the brain. We empirically validate the effectiveness of our proposed method by competing with or surpassing the performance of some strong baselines on multiple MiniGrid environments.