Publications

To thrive in complex environments, animals and artificial agents must learn to act adaptively to maximize fitness and rewards. Such adaptive behaviour can be learned through reinforcement learning, a class of algorithms that has been successful at...

The widespread adoption of deep learning to model neural activity often relies on “black-box” approaches that lack an interpretable connection between neural activity and network parameters. Here, we propose using algorithm unrolling, a method for...

Associative learning depends on contingency, the degree to which a stimulus predicts an outcome. Despite its importance, the neural mechanisms linking contingency to behavior remain elusive. In the present study, we examined the dopamine activity in the...

Responding appropriately to potential threats before they materializeis critical to avoiding disastrous outcomes. Here we examine howthreat-coping behavior is regulated by the tail of the striatum (TS) and its dopamine input. Mice were presented with a...

Social grouping increases survival in many species, including humans1,2. By contrast, social isolation generates an aversive state (‘loneliness’) that motivates social seeking and heightens social interaction upon reunion3,4,5. The observed rebound in...

Machine learning research has achieved large performance gains on a wide range of tasks by expanding the learning target from mean rewards to entire probability distributions of rewards — an approach known as distributional reinforcement learning (RL)¹...

This chapter discusses diversity in the signaling properties of dopamine neurons, with a particular focus on their activity and function in response to reward and threat. While dopamine neurons were traditionally reported to be excited by reward-related...

In this chapter, we discuss anatomical and functional inputs and outputs of dopamine neurons. Classical tracing studies show that the midbrain areas where dopamine neurons are located receive projections from various brain areas, and dopamine neurons, in...

Dopamine neurons in the ventral midbrain play important roles in various behavioral functions such as learning, motivation, and movement. The exact mechanisms and algorithms by which dopamine regulates these functions, however, remain to be clarified...