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Synthetic biology and bioengineering provide the opportunity to create novel embodied cognitive systems (otherwise known as minds) in a very wide variety of chimeric architectures combining evolved and designed material and software. These…
Evolution sculpts both the body plans and nervous systems of agents together over time. In contrast, in AI and robotics, a robot's body plan is usually designed by hand, and control policies are then optimized for that fixed design. The…
Theory of mind (ToM) enables AI systems to infer agents' hidden goals and mental states, but existing approaches focus mainly on small human understandable gridworld spaces. We introduce HiVAE, a hierarchical variational architecture that…
Deep reinforcement learning primarily focuses on learning behavior, usually overlooking the fact that an agent's function is largely determined by form. So, how should one go about finding a morphology fit for solving tasks in a given…
The minimal requirements for life are autopoiesis and cognition. We propose autopoietic models with cognition and perform three classes of evolutionary simulation. In our models the plasticity of the metabolic cycle and the regulation…
Self-evolving language-model agents must decide what to learn next and how to preserve what they have learned across iterations. Existing systems typically carry this cross-iteration knowledge as natural-language feedback, flat episodic…
The emerging field of diverse intelligence seeks an integrated view of problem-solving in agents of very different provenance, composition, and substrates. From subcellular chemical networks to swarms of organisms, and across evolved,…
Understanding the rules underlying organismal development is a major unsolved problem in biology. Each cell in a developing organism responds to signals in its local environment by dividing, excreting, consuming, or reorganizing, yet how…
Artificial intelligence research to a great degree focuses on the brain and behaviors that the brain generates. But the brain, an extremely complex structure resulting from millions of years of evolution, can be viewed as a solution to…
The last few years have witnessed substantial progress in the field of embodied AI where artificial agents, mirroring biological counterparts, are now able to learn from interaction to accomplish complex tasks. Despite this success,…
Animals thrive in a constantly changing environment and leverage the temporal structure to learn well-factorized causal representations. In contrast, traditional neural networks suffer from forgetting in changing environments and many…
Theory-of-Mind (ToM) enables humans to infer mental states-such as beliefs, desires, and intentions-forming the foundation of social cognition. However, existing computational ToM methods rely on structured workflows with ToM-specific…
This paper presents EINCASM, a prototype system employing a novel framework for studying emergent intelligence in organisms resembling slime molds. EINCASM evolves neural cellular automata with NEAT to maximize cell growth constrained by…
In this paper, we show that organisms can be modeled as hierarchical Bayesian control systems with small world and information bottleneck (bow-tie) network structure. Such systems combine hierarchical perception with hierarchical goal…
The dominant artificial intelligence paradigm trains neural architectures via gradient descent against proxy objectives and reinforcement learning from human feedback. While remarkably capable, this top-down optimization inherently…
The relationship between intelligence and evolution is bidirectional: while evolution can help evolve intelligences, the degree of intelligence itself can impact evolution (Baldwin, 1896). In the field of Evolutionary Computation, the…
Biological genotypes do not code directly for phenotypes; developmental physiology is the control layer that separates genomes from capacities ascertained by selection. A key aspect is competency, as cells are not a passive material but…
Adaptive control in biological systems, such as intestinal immunity, remains poorly understood despite detailed knowledge of underlying regulatory networks. We propose an alternative framework based on stochastic martingale turnover, in…
In recent years, there have been many computational simulations of spontaneous neural dynamics. Here, we explore a model of spontaneous neural dynamics and allow it to control a virtual agent moving in a simple environment. This setup…
In this work, a conceptual bio-inspired parallel and distributed learning framework for the emergence of general intelligence is proposed, where agents evolve through environmental rewards and learn throughout their lifetime without…