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Whole-Brain Connectomic Graph Model Enables Whole-Body Locomotion Control in Fly (arxiv.org)
2 points by sosodev 205 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A controller for a simulated fruit fly is built from the real fly's brain wiring map, then trained by trial and error to move its body. It stayed steady across many movement tasks and learned faster than controllers that ignore or simplify that wiring.

Abstract · Whole-Brain Connectomic Graph Model Enables Whole-Body Locomotion Control in Fruit Fly

Animals perform coordinated whole-body movements under the control of neural systems shaped by brain-wide connectivity. The mapping of the whole-brain neural connections, or the connectomes, provides a natural graph for modeling sensorimotor information flow, yet its potential as a neural controller for embodied agents remains largely unexplored. Here, we introduce the Fly-connectomic Graph Model, which directly instantiates the whole-brain connectome of an adult Drosophila as a graph-structured neural controller for movements of a simulated biomechanical fruit fly via deep reinforcement learning. We achieve stable performance across diverse locomotion tasks, as well as better sample efficiency compared to both graph and non-graph baselines. Our results demonstrate a biologically informed way towards effective control policy design by translating whole-brain wiring principles into actionable architectural priors, while also improving the interpretability through dynamic information flow. This work also highlights the potential to bridge neuromechanics with embodied intelligence by providing a computational platform for investigating the sensorimotor transformation underlying animal behavior and a paradigm to advance the development of more nature-aligned intelligent systems.

Zehao Jin, Yaoye Zhu, Chen Zhang, Yanan Sui
arXiv:2602.17997 · cs.LG, cs.RO · submitted Feb 20, 2026 · updated Jun 14, 2026
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Also discussed: Mar 2026 (2 points, 0 comments)