A neuroscience inspired gated learning action selection mechanism

This paper presents an algorithm for action selection, in the context of intelligent agents, capable of learning from rewards which are sparse in time. Inspiration for the proposed algorithm was drawn from computational neuroscience models of how the human prefrontal cortex (PFC) works. We have observed that this abstraction provides some advantages, such as the representation of solutions as trees, making it human-readable, and turning the learning process into a combinatorial optimization problem. Results for it solving the 1-2-AX working memory task are presented and discussed. We also argue the pros and cons of the proposed algorithm and, finally, address potential future work.