Multi-Sacle Dynamic Coding Improved Spiking Actor Network for Reinforcement Learning

With the help of deep neural networks (DNNs), deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved great success on many complex tasks, from games to robotic control. Compared to DNNs with partial brain-inspired structures and functions, spiking neural networks (SNNs) consider more biological features, including spiking neurons with complex dynamics and learning paradigms with biologically plausible plasticity principles. Inspired by the efficient computation of cell assembly in the biological brain, whereby memorybased coding is much more complex than readout, we propose a multiscale dynamic coding improved spiking actor network (MDC-SAN) for reinforcement learning to achieve effective decision-making. The population coding at the network scale is integrated with the dynamic neurons coding (containing 2nd-order neuronal dynamics) at the neuron scale towards a powerful spatial-temporal state representation. Extensive experimental results show that our MDC-SAN performs better than its counterpart deep actor network (based on DNNs) on four continuous control tasks from OpenAI gym. We think this is a significant attempt to improve SNNs from the perspective of efficient coding towards effective decisionmaking, just like that in biological networks.

Authors

• Duzhen Zhang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
• Tielin Zhang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
• Shuncheng Jia
• Bo Xu Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

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