{"pk":29496,"title":"Learning in Social Environments with Curious Neural Agents","subtitle":null,"abstract":"From an early age, humans are capable of learning about theirsocial environment, making predictions of how other agentswill operate and decisions about how they themselves will in-teract. In this work, we address the problem of formalizing thelearning principles underlying these abilities. We construct a cu-rious neural agent that can efficiently learn predictive models ofsocial environments that are rich with external agents inspiredby real-world animate behaviors such as peekaboo, chasing,and mimicry. Our curious neural agent consists of a controllerdriven by γ-Progress, a scalable and effective curiosity signal,and a disentangled world model that allocates separate networksfor interdependent components of the world. We show that ourdisentangled curiosity-driven agent achieves higher learning ef-ficiency and prediction performance than strong baselines. Cru-cially, we find that a preference for animate attention emergesnaturally in our model, and is a key driver of performance. Fi-nally we discuss future directions including applications of ourframework to modeling human behavior and designing earlyindicators for developmental variability.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"world models; curiosity; social cognition"}],"section":"Agend-based Models","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6n36z63m","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Megumi","middle_name":"","last_name":"Sano","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Julian","middle_name":"De","last_name":"Freitas","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard University","department":""},{"first_name":"Nick","middle_name":"","last_name":"Haber","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Daniel","middle_name":"L. K.","last_name":"Yamins","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29496/galley/19356/download/"}]}