The paper investigates how an embodied agent can prioritize competing bodily needs using active inference. It compares two strategies: increasing the precision of information about an urgent need and reweighting preferences for outcomes that relieve that need, both individually and combined, within a foraging gridworld with lethal needs. The study finds that precision improves survival and sharpens interoceptive beliefs, while preference reweighting keeps states away from lethal thresholds and alters the agent’s learned body model, with both interventions positively interacting to enhance survival across varied layouts.
arXiv:2610.18617v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An embodied agent must prioritise among competing bodily needs. In active inference, it can respond to an urgent need by increasing the precision of in...
arXiv:2608. 04232v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Biological systems must regulate competing needs under limited perceptual bandwidth, where sharpening one estimate costs the capacity to sharpen the others.
arXiv:2609.39342v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Intrinsic motivation plays a central role in adaptive and goal-directed behavior by conferring agents reward-independent objectives and biases useful...
Intrinsic motivation plays a central role in adaptive and goal-directed behavior by conferring agents reward-independent objectives and biases useful to act in noisy and uncertain environments. Active...
The paper introduces Risk‑Sensitive Satisficing (RS), a bandit learning rule that evaluates actions based on their past frequency and their surplus or shortfall relative to an aspiration level. RS can be reformulated as Attention Competitive Bayes (ACB), a Bayesian‑like estimator where the aspiration level serves as a prior mean and the limited number of trials limits how strongly evidence can override this prior. ACB predicts that unchosen actions gradually revert toward the aspiration level (pseudo‑forgetting) and that when the aspiration is unattainable, exploration never fully settles, reducing regret in simulations.
EmbodiedCLBench is the first benchmark designed to evaluate continual learning in embodied simulation environments, focusing on self‑evolving agents. The benchmark uses compositional generalization to test whether agents can learn basic tasks and then recombine those skills to solve more complex, unseen tasks. Experiments across various agent harnesses and learning methods reveal that while basic task experience improves performance on advanced tasks, this benefit does not scale with more learning samples and current agents fail to extract additional useful information.
arXiv:2608. 06420v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Perception in biological systems is inherently noisy, requiring organisms to make decisions under uncertainty where misclassification can be costly or fatal.
arXiv:2610.16895v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLMs are used as high-level controllers for embodied agents, but it remains unclear whether they support collaborative reasoning, such as anticipating...
arXiv:2605. 10332v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Embodied agents can benefit from skills that guide object search, action execution, and state changes across diverse environments.
The paper investigates how curriculum learning affects reinforcement learning in a minimal policy learning model. It shows that when rewards are dense, curricula offer only marginal benefits, but when rewards are sparse, curricula become essential for learning to occur. The study also highlights that competing objectives—minimizing effort versus maximizing reward—create distinct optima that curricula can help navigate by reducing reward sparsity and reshaping the reward landscape.
arXiv:2609.05834v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: World models promise a general route to embodied intelligence: learn predictive dynamics once, then reason, plan, and act with them. Increasingly, the...
The paper introduces SCAMPER, a system that trains a virtual rat model to exhibit realistic movements during both goal-directed tasks and random exploration. SCAMPER employs a variational architecture with two priors—a motion prior for control and a behavior prior for exploration—to generate natural behavior and effectively exploit task structure. The system can learn from sparse rewards, enabling realistic modeling of sparse-reward tasks used in experimental neuroscience.