# Balancing New Against Old Information: The Role of Surprise in Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.05642 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05642/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 17 Jun 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [The Construction of Reality in an AI: A Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05448/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Surprise describes a range of phenomena from unexpected events to behavioral responses. We propose a measure of surprise and use it for surprise-driven learning. Our surprise measure takes into account data likelihood as well as the degree of commitment to a belief via the entropy of the belief distribution. We find that surprise-minimizing learning dynamically adjusts the balance between new and old information without the need of knowledge about the temporal statistics of the environment. We apply our framework to a dynamic decision-making task and a maze exploration task. Our surprise minimizing framework is suitable for learning in complex environments, even if the environment undergoes gradual or sudden changes and could eventually provide a framework to study the behavior of humans and animals encountering surprising events.