Multifunctionality in embodied agents: Three levels of neural reuse
This work addresses the challenge of adaptive behavior in robotics and AI by showing how neural resources can be reused, though it is incremental in exploring mechanisms beyond neuromodulation.
The authors tackled the problem of how embodied agents can perform multiple behaviors without neuromodulation, demonstrating that neural reuse across structural, autonomous, and transient dynamics enables multifunctionality in a brain-body-environment system.
The brain in conjunction with the body is able to adapt to new environments and perform multiple behaviors through reuse of neural resources and transfer of existing behavioral traits. Although mechanisms that underlie this ability are not well understood, they are largely attributed to neuromodulation. In this work, we demonstrate that an agent can be multifunctional using the same sensory and motor systems across behaviors, in the absence of modulatory mechanisms. Further, we lay out the different levels at which neural reuse can occur through a dynamical filtering of the brain-body-environment system's operation: structural network, autonomous dynamics, and transient dynamics. Notably, transient dynamics reuse could only be explained by studying the brain-body-environment system as a whole and not just the brain. The multifunctional agent we present here demonstrates neural reuse at all three levels.