In plain words: A grid of simple cells that talk only to their neighbors gradually writes out a controller's connections, the way an embryo builds itself. Unlike usual agents trained directly, the grown controllers solved standard control tasks and rewrote themselves to handle changed versions.
Abstract
In contrast to deep reinforcement learning agents, biological neural networks are grown through a self-organized developmental process. Here we propose a new hypernetwork approach to grow artificial neural networks based on neural cellular automata (NCA). Inspired by self-organising systems and information-theoretic approaches to developmental biology, we show that our HyperNCA method can grow neural networks capable of solving common reinforcement learning tasks. Finally, we explore how the same approach can be used to build developmental metamorphosis networks capable of transforming their weights to solve variations of the initial RL task.
Elias Najarro, Shyam Sudhakaran, Claire Glanois, Sebastian Risi
arXiv:2204.11674 · cs.NE, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Apr 25, 2022
abstract · pdf · html · Paper accepted as a conference paper at ICLR 'From Cells to Societies' workshop 2022