title: Cognitive navigation based on nonuniform Gabor space sampling, unsupervised growing networks, and reinforcement learning.
abstract: We study spatial learning and navigation for autonomous agents. A state space representation is constructed by unsupervised Hebbian learning during exploration. As a result of learning, a representation of the continuous two-dimensional (2-D) manifold in the high-dimensional input space is found. The representation consists of a population of localized overlapping place fields covering the 2-D space densely and uniformly. This space coding is comparable to the representation provided by hippocampal place cells in rats. Place fields are learned by extracting spatio-temporal properties of the environment from sensory inputs. The visual scene is modeled using the responses of modified Gabor filters placed at the nodes of a sparse Log-polar graph. Visual sensory aliasing is eliminated by taking into account self-motion signals via path integration. This solves the hidden state problem and provides a suitable representation for applying reinforcement learning in continuous space for action selection. A temporal-difference prediction scheme is used to learn sensorimotor mappings to perform goal-oriented navigation. Population vector coding is employed to interpret ensemble neural activity. The model is validated on a mobile Khepera miniature robot.
authors.affiliation: Neuroscience Group, SONY Computer Science Laboratory, 75005 Paris, France. angelo.arleo@csi.sony.fr
authors.forename: Angelo
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Arleo
authors.forename: Fabrizio
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Smeraldi
authors.forename: Wulfram
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Gerstner
mesh_terms: D003071:Cognition; D007858:Learning; D016571:Neural Networks, Computer; D012054:Reinforcement, Psychology