# The Emergence of Abstract and Episodic Neurons in Episodic Meta-RL

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.02959 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02959/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 10 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Apr 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Learning to reinforcement learn](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05763/) (2016)
- [Been There, Done That: Meta-Learning with Episodic Recall](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.09692/) (2018)
- [Psychlab: A Psychology Laboratory for Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08116/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we analyze the reinstatement mechanism introduced by Ritter et al. (2018) to reveal two classes of neurons that emerge in the agent's working memory (an epLSTM cell) when trained using episodic meta-RL on an episodic variant of the Harlow visual fixation task. Specifically, Abstract neurons encode knowledge shared across tasks, while Episodic neurons carry information relevant for a specific episode's task.