Cog Lunch: Vinayak Bansal (Seethapathi Lab)
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Building 46, 3037, Middlesex
Vinayak Bansal (Seethapathi Lab) Tuesday, October 27th, 2026 12pm Location: 46-3037 Speaker: Vinayak Bansal Lab: (Seethapathi Lab) Talk Title: Learning to Predict Failure Talk Abstract: When we learn a new skill, such as riding a bicycle or balancing a pencil on a finger, we do more than simply refine our movements. We also develop a sense of which movements will lead to success and which will not. However, how exactly learners acquire this sense of failure prediction is not well understood. It is also unclear how this ability to estimate failure impacts learning. In this talk, I will present a task-general model in which an agent discovers from experience which movement states lead to failure during learning. The agent uses this accumulated knowledge to pre-emptively abort attempts that are doomed to fail, so that exploration zeroes in on states from which success is more likely. We find that agents that learn to anticipate failure in this manner reach better, more energy-efficient solutions and learn faster than agents without this ability. These results suggest that predicting impending failure is learned alongside the skill itself and plays a key role in making practice efficient. Speaker Bio: Vinayak Bansal is graduate student in Brain and Cognitive Sciences in the Seethapathi Motor Control Group, where he studies task general principles of motor control. He is interested in developing biologically inspired models of motor control by combining insights from movement science with mathematical modeling. Prior to this, he earned his undergraduate in Chemical Engineering from IIT Delhi. Outside of research, he enjoys running and hiking.