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Combining Backpropagation with Equilibrium Propagation to improve an Actor-Critic RL framework

Kubo, Y.; Chalmers, E.; Luczak, A.

2022-06-25 neuroscience
10.1101/2022.06.21.496871 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Backpropagation has been used to train neural networks for many years, allowing them to solve a wide variety of tasks like image classification, speech recognition, and reinforcement learning tasks. But the biological plausibility of backpropagation as a mechanism of neural learning has been questioned. Equilibrium Propagation (EP) has been proposed as a more biologically plausible alternative and achieves comparable accuracy on the CIFAR-10 image classification task. This study proposes the first EP-based reinforcement learning architecture: an actor-critic architecture with the actor network trained by EP. We show that this model can solve the basic control tasks often used as benchmarks for BP-based models. Interestingly, our trained model demonstrates more consistent high-reward behavior than a comparable model trained exclusively by backpropagation.

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