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RL for Psychometrics

A compact project that fuses reinforcement learning with psychometrics to infer interpretable individual ability from interaction trajectories.


Summary

We model human decision making as an MDP with a shared value function \(Q_\theta(s, a)\) and a per-participant inverse temperature \(\beta_j > 0\). Parameters are estimated jointly via a generalized EM procedure that balances behavioral likelihood and value-consistency regularization.


What’s in this project

  • Methodology — task formulation, probabilistic policy, generalized EM, and regularization (λ_bell, λ_cql, β priors).
  • Experiments — Peg Solitaire (4×4, 7×7), β recovery, convergence diagnostics, and Q-function evaluation.

Project goals

  1. Interpretability — connect RL dynamics to psychological constructs via \(\beta_j\).
  2. Identifiability — separate \(\beta\) and \(Q\) under joint estimation.
  3. Generalization — learn \(Q\) that transfers across participants and tasks.

Repository

Github Repository


Maintainer: Wenqian Xu