Computational Modeling of Emotion-Motivated Decisions for Continuous Control of Mobile Robots

Xiao Huang, Wei Wu, Hong Qiao

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

18 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Immediate rewards are usually very sparse in the real world, which brings a great challenge to plain learning methods. Inspired by the fact that emotional reactions are incorporated into the computation of subjective value during decision-making in humans, an emotion-motivated decision-making framework is proposed in this article. Specifically, we first build a brain-inspired computational model of amygdala-hippocampus interaction to generate emotional reactions. The intrinsic emotion derives from the external reward and episodic memory and represents three psychological states: 1) valence; 2) novelty; and 3) motivational relevance. Then, a model-based (MB) decision-making approach with emotional intrinsic rewards is proposed to solve the continuous control problem of mobile robots. This method can execute online MB control with the constraint of the model-free policy and global value function, which is conducive to getting a better solution with a faster policy search. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach has higher learning efficiency and maintains a higher level of exploration, especially, in some very sparse-reward environments.

Original languageEnglish
Article number8947977
Pages (from-to)31-44
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems
Volume13
Issue number1
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Mar 2021
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Brain-inspired computing
  • decision making
  • emotion-memory interactions
  • emotion-motivated learning
  • reinforcement learning

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Huang, X., Wu, W., & Qiao, H. (2021). Computational Modeling of Emotion-Motivated Decisions for Continuous Control of Mobile Robots. IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems, 13(1), 31-44. Article 8947977. https://doi.org/10.1109/TCDS.2019.2963545