The First Philosophy and Reinforcement Learning Symposium

The Philosophy and Reinforcement Learning Symposium (PRL) is a two-day meeting that brings together researchers in reinforcement learning, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science to examine foundational questions at the intersection of these fields. The first PRL symposium will be held at UMass Amherst in Amherst, MA on May 1–2.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become central both as an engineering paradigm for sequential decision-making and as a conceptual framework in cognitive science and neuroscience. Yet many of RL’s foundational commitments—such as how to interpret "reward," the normative assumptions implicit in optimization, and the relationship between algorithmic learning rules and human cognition—remain underexamined and, in some cases, underdeveloped. Addressing these issues requires not only philosophical analysis of existing RL frameworks, but also new technical work within RL itself, including the development of methods that better reflect normative, cognitive, or experiential considerations. The Philosophy and Reinforcement Learning Symposium (PRL) is designed to foster sustained, genuinely bidirectional exchange between philosophy and reinforcement learning, bringing together researchers who aim both to sharpen philosophical accounts of learning and mind and to advance reinforcement learning theory and practice in light of those accounts.

The symposium is supported by the HFA and CICS Collaborative Seed Fund and is co-organized by Eleonore Neufeld (Department of Philosophy, HFA) and Philip Thomas (Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, CICS).

For more information (including program, room number, and registration), please consult the website.