NeurIPS 2020

R-learning in actor-critic model offers a biologically relevant mechanism for sequential decision-making


Meta Review

This is a well-written and presented paper proposing a new framework for modeling animal behavior during a foraging task, and should be of interest to the NeurIPS audience. After rebuttal, 3 of the reviewers recommended accept based on it providing a nice link between the behavioral economics and reinforcement learning communities, and its strengths in both theory and empirical results. Therefore, I tentatively recommend accept. That said, during the discussions some concerns were brought up regarding some missing related work. I urge the authors to consider discussing in their final version several related works that R4, and I think are quite relevant: Daw et al, 2002, Neural Networks; Schwighofer & Doya 2003, Neural Networks; Niv et al 2006/2007 (and related), and also some works from motivation modeling literature (that R2 mentions in their review). In the end, I don’t think this is enough to warrant rejection, but it does make this more of a borderline case for me.