The study investigates how intrinsic motivation drives autonomous behavior in fruit flies by combining whole-brain recordings with a neuromechanical digital twin. It shows that a hierarchical policy selecting from low‑level motor primitives, trained with 20 intrinsic motivation algorithms, can reproduce fly locomotor statistics and internal representations of future actions. The DIAYN algorithm, which maximizes behavioral entropy and sensory separability, best matches fly behavior and neural coding, capturing individual variability and interhemispheric kinematic encoding.
By Declan Kutscher, Reece Keller, Alyn Kirsch, Felix Pei, Aran Nayebi
arXiv:2611.13113v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: In the absence of extrinsic rewards or task supervision, human behavior is guided by intrinsic motivation---neural signals that drive curiosity, creati...
By Reece Keller, Declan Kutscher, Xaq Pitkow, Aran Nayebi
Animals have a remarkable capacity for autonomy---driven by intrinsic motivation---without external sensory cues or extrinsic objectives, yet the computational mechanisms behind this ability largely r...
arXiv:2601.12310v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Self-training systems often degenerate due to the lack of an external criterion for judging data quality, leading to reward hacking and semantic dr...
By Jennifer Dodgson, Alfath Daryl Alhajir, Michael Joedhitya, Akira Rafhael Janson Pattirane, Surender Suresh Kumar, Joseph Lim, C. H. Peh, Adith Ramdas, Steven Zhang Zhexu
arXiv:2607. 08647v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As autonomous agents are increasingly deployed across diverse operational contexts, aligning their behavior with human intent demands reward functions that remain robust to such changes rather than overfitting to any single environment.
By Ali Larian, Qian Lin, Chang Zong Wu, Daniel S. Brown
EvolvingBrain introduces an adaptive skill system that enables multi-modal agents to self‑evolve in open worlds. The system comprises Stratified Skill Self‑Evolution, which extracts procedural and problematic patterns from trajectories to build a multi‑granularity skill architecture, and State‑Aware Adaptive Execution, which uses structured memory to guide skill fusion based on the agent’s current state. Experiments on VAB‑Minecraft and DiscoveryWorld show improved success rates and generalization, with code available for public release.
By Runxuan Liu, Jingqi Shi, Baoxin Wang, Honghong Zhao, Haoyuan Xu, Yueqing Sun, Jiafeng Liang, Tao He, Dayong Wu, Qi Gu, Shijin Wang, Ming Liu, Bing Qin
arXiv:2509. 03206v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning from reward functions and imitation learning of demonstrations are the two principal approaches for training autonomous systems that interact with an environment through action and observation.
By Zeqiang Zhang, Fabian Wurzberger, Gerrit Schmid, Sebastian Gottwald, Daniel A. Braun
arXiv:2606. 20858v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The temporal structure of reward composition in reinforcement learning (RL) is typically hand-designed and held fixed throughout training, leaving the progression of motivational priorities largely unexplored.
By Alan Nadelsticher Ruvalcaba
arXiv:2609.07575v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: This work introduces an alternative view of efficient exploration and studies its theoretical and empirical implications in the absence of extrinsic...
By Mikel Malag\'on, Jon Vadillo, Josu Ceberio, Michael Bowling, Jose A. Lozano
The paper investigates when intrinsic rewards effectively drive exploration in reinforcement learning. It introduces a formal criterion that evaluates policies based on the counterfactual information they acquire, comparing how well their histories can replace experience from alternative policies. Using a simple environment, the authors show that common intrinsic reward objectives—count-based, prediction-error, empowerment, and information-gain—can lead to Pareto-suboptimal exploration under this criterion, and they propose conditions and a new objective that better align with optimal exploration.
By Scott W. Viteri (Stanford University), Laura Gomezjurado Gonzalez (Stanford University), Clark Barrett (Stanford University)
arXiv:2509. 10656v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: For groups of autonomous agents to achieve a particular goal, they must engage in coordination and long-horizon reasoning.
By Chirayu Nimonkar, Shlok Shah, Catherine Ji, Benjamin Eysenbach
arXiv:2507.11482v5 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Artificial learning systems are graduating from passive learners to increasingly autonomous agents, lending pragmatic urgency to the question of wh...
By Mani Hamidi, Terrence W. Deacon