CONTROLLING AGENTS USING STATE ASSOCIATIVE LEARNING FOR LONG-TERM CREDIT ASSIGNMENT

A computer-implemented reinforcement learning neural network system that learns a model of rewards in order to relate actions by an agent in an environment to their long-term consequences. The model learns to decompose the rewards into components explainable by different past states. That is, the model learns to associate when being in a particular state of the environment is predictive of a reward in a later state, even when the later state, and reward, is only achieved after a very long time delay.