Related papers: Learning Robust Real-Time Cultural Transmission wi…
How do people acquire rich, flexible knowledge about their environment from others despite limited cognitive capacity? Humans are often thought to rely on computationally costly mentalizing, such as inferring others' beliefs. In contrast,…
Cultural accumulation drives the open-ended and diverse progress in capabilities spanning human history. It builds an expanding body of knowledge and skills by combining individual exploration with inter-generational information…
Knowledge built culturally across generations allows humans to learn far more than an individual could glean from their own experience in a lifetime. Cultural knowledge in turn rests on language: language is the richest record of what…
Cumulative cultural evolution occurs when adaptive innovations are passed down to consecutive generations through social learning. This process has shaped human technological innovation, but also occurs in non-human species. While it is…
Research in cultural evolution aims at providing causal explanations for the change of culture over time. Over the past decades, this field has generated an important body of knowledge, using experimental, historical, and computational…
The ability of humans to create and disseminate culture is often credited as the single most important factor of our success as a species. In this Perspective, we explore the notion of machine culture, culture mediated or generated by…
Human culture is uniquely cumulative and open-ended. Using a computational model of cultural evolution in which neural network based agents evolve ideas for actions through invention and imitation, we tested the hypothesis that this is due…
We use model-free reinforcement learning, extensive simulation, and transfer learning to develop a continuous control algorithm that has good zero-shot performance in a real physical environment. We train a simulated agent to act optimally…
Intelligent machines with superhuman capabilities have the potential to uncover problem-solving strategies beyond human discovery. Emerging evidence from competitive gameplay, such as Go and chess, demonstrates that AI systems are evolving…
Constructing a universal moral code for artificial intelligence (AI) is difficult or even impossible, given that different human cultures have different definitions of morality and different societal norms. We therefore argue that the value…
Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…
Referential games offer a grounded learning environment for neural agents which accounts for the fact that language is functionally used to communicate. However, they do not take into account a second constraint considered to be fundamental…
When deploying autonomous agents in the real world, we need effective ways of communicating objectives to them. Traditional skill learning has revolved around reinforcement and imitation learning, each with rigid constraints on the format…
We consider the fundamental question: how a legacy "student" Artificial Intelligent (AI) system could learn from a legacy "teacher" AI system or a human expert without complete re-training and, most importantly, without requiring…
Culture is not just traits but a dynamic system of interdependent beliefs, practices and artefacts embedded in cognitive, social and material structures. Culture evolves as these entities interact, generating path dependence, attractor…
A wide variety of cultural practices take the form of "tacit" knowledge, where the rules and principles are neither obvious to an observer nor known explicitly by the practitioners. This poses a problem for cultural evolution: if beginners…
Traditionally, cognitive and computer scientists have viewed intelligence solipsistically, as a property of unitary agents devoid of social context. Given the success of contemporary learning algorithms, we argue that the bottleneck in…
Culture involves the origination and transmission of ideas, but the conditions in which culture can emerge and evolve are unclear. We constructed and studied a highly simplified neural-network model of these processes. In this model ideas…
Transfer learning is an essential tool for improving the performance of primary tasks by leveraging information from auxiliary data resources. In this work, we propose Adaptive Robust Transfer Learning (ART), a flexible pipeline of…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has produced spectacular results in games, robotics, and continuous control. Yet, despite these successes, learned policies often fail to generalize beyond their training distribution, limiting real-world impact.…