
How the Irresistible Lure of Curiosity Is Generated in the Brain - laurex
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/11/22/473975
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TaupeRanger
Continues the brilliant trend of neuroscience hubris and ignorance of the
human mind. "How X is generated by the brain". Answer: "lol we have no fucking
clue but here are some brain regions that light up in our machine that are
vaguely associated with this phenomenon. We'll still say that we explained
'how' this happens in the title of our paper though".

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briga
Reinforcement learning has a pretty useful framework for thinking about this
called the exploration-exploitation dilemma.

In order for an agent to fully exploit it's environment it first has to
explore that environment, and this is where curiosity becomes useful. In fact,
last year there was a paper that tried to introduce curiosity to RL-based
learning models [1]

I suspect some sort of cross-pollination of these two areas of research would
be useful.

[1]
[https://www.google.com/url?q=https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.0536...](https://www.google.com/url?q=https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.05363&sa=U&ved=2ahUKEwiLwb7Kr_DeAhUE7Z8KHaTjDkQQFjAAegQIAhAB&usg=AOvVaw1tEAL8VpFHjtFkDIhSK_RU)

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deepnotderp
I view intrinsic curiosity as different from exploitation-exploration, the
latter of which has its roots as far back as WWII and bandit problems.

Imho, curiosity is something fundamentally different than randomly trying new
stuff in hopes of finding something with higher reward. Some of the artificial
curiosity/intrinsic motivation work in RL seems to suggest this as well.

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winchling
_> Imho, curiosity is something fundamentally different than_

So what's it all about then? Go on, I'm curious...

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deepnotderp
If I knew then I would be in a pretty powerful position :)

But at least some starting point: exploration-exploitation is basically
chasing something with a better outcome, for example, if I'm working on some
project, I might look at random websites for hopes of finding something useful
for that project, on the other hand, curiosity would be me just looking at
things that are "interesting". Right now in RL artificial curiosity research
we use novelty as a heuristic for "interesting" but we haven't really solved
what "interesting" is yet I think.

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winchling
Right! Curiosity could very well be about optimising the structure of one's
_existing_ knowledge rather than finding out new things per se. A distinctly
non-random process.

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bfoks
"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious." [1]

~ Albert Einstein

[1] -
[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Albert_Einstein)

