Efficient Learning of Predictive Maps for Flexible Planning

Abstract Cognitive maps enable flexible behavior by providing reusable internal representations of task structure. The successor representation, a predictive map that encodes expected future state occupancy, has been proposed as one way such maps might be computed in the brain, but its policy dependence severely limits flexible planning. We introduce a new model, the successor representation with importance sampling (SR-IS), which combines temporal-difference learning with importance sampling to construct policy-independent predictive maps. SR-IS learns the structure of the environment without being constrained by the agent’s current decision policy. These representations can be efficiently updated when the environment changes, enabling rapid behavioral adaptation. We show that SR-IS outperforms existing models in planning tasks and provides a better account of the graded biases in human replanning that previous models could not explain. This work bridges theories of predictive maps with observed planning behavior and offers new insights into flexible decision-making in the brain.