Changing the Environment based on Intrinsic Motivation
This addresses the challenge of autonomous environment modification for agents, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing empowerment principles with a qualitative evaluation.
The paper tackled the problem of enabling agents to autonomously restructure their environment for their own benefit, using the information-theoretic principle of empowerment as an intrinsic motivation, and demonstrated a qualitative result where an agent built a staircase-like structure in a 3D gridworld.
One of the remarkable feats of intelligent life is that it restructures the world it lives in for its own benefit. This extended abstract outlines how the information-theoretic principle of empowerment, as an intrinsic motivation, can be used to restructure the environment an agent lives in. We present a first qualitative evaluation of how an agent in a 3d-gridworld builds a staircase-like structure, which reflects the agent's embodiment.