Donsuk Lee

Denizhan Pak, Donsuk Lee, Samantha M. W. Wood et al.

Recent progress in artificial intelligence has renewed interest in building machines that learn like animals. Almost all of the work comparing learning across biological and artificial systems comes from studies where animals and machines received different training data, obscuring whether differences between animals and machines emerged from differences in learning mechanisms versus training data. We present an experimental approach-a "newborn embodied Turing Test"-that allows newborn animals and machines to be raised in the same environments and tested with the same tasks, permitting direct comparison of their learning abilities. To make this platform, we first collected controlled-rearing data from newborn chicks, then performed "digital twin" experiments in which machines were raised in virtual environments that mimicked the rearing conditions of the chicks. We found that (1) machines (deep reinforcement learning agents with intrinsic motivation) can spontaneously develop visually guided preference behavior, akin to imprinting in newborn chicks, and (2) machines are still far from newborn-level performance on object recognition tasks. Almost all of the chicks developed view-invariant object recognition, whereas the machines tended to develop view-dependent recognition. The learning outcomes were also far more constrained in the chicks versus machines. Ultimately, we anticipate that this approach will help researchers develop embodied AI systems that learn like newborn animals.

Joshua McGraw, Donsuk Lee, Justin Wood

What are the computational foundations of social grouping? Traditional approaches to this question have focused on verbal reasoning or simple (low-dimensional) quantitative models. In the real world, however, social preferences emerge when high-dimensional learning systems (brains and bodies) interact with high-dimensional sensory inputs during an animal's embodied interactions with the world. A deep understanding of social grouping will therefore require embodied models that learn directly from sensory inputs using high-dimensional learning mechanisms. To this end, we built artificial neural networks (ANNs), embodied those ANNs in virtual fish bodies, and raised the artificial fish in virtual fish tanks that mimicked the rearing conditions of real fish. We then compared the social preferences that emerged in real fish versus artificial fish. We found that when artificial fish had two core learning mechanisms (reinforcement learning and curiosity-driven learning), artificial fish developed fish-like social preferences. Like real fish, the artificial fish spontaneously learned to prefer members of their own group over members of other groups. The artificial fish also spontaneously learned to self-segregate with their in-group, akin to self-segregation behavior seen in nature. Our results suggest that social grouping can emerge from three ingredients: (1) reinforcement learning, (2) intrinsic motivation, and (3) early social experiences with in-group members. This approach lays a foundation for reverse engineering animal-like social behavior with image-computable models, bridging the divide between high-dimensional sensory inputs and social preferences.