在超大规模生态中,智能体自发演化出复杂行为,揭示了环境规模的关键作用。
The Emergence of Complex Behavior in Large-Scale Ecological Environments
- 无奖励机制下,通过繁殖、变异与自然选择驱动智能体演化。
- 超过6万智能体在大尺度环境中自发形成捕食、远距离觅食等复杂行为。
- 仅在足够大的环境和种群中出现的稳定行为,适合研究自组织与演化机制。
我们研究物理尺度与种群规模如何塑造开放生态环境中复杂行为的涌现。在该设定中,智能体未受监督且无显式奖励或学习目标,而是通过繁殖、突变与自然选择随时间演化;它们在行动中也持续改变自身环境及周围种群。目标并非优化单一高性能策略,而是考察在自然竞争与环境压力下,行为如何在大规模种群中涌现与演化。我们利用现代硬件与新型多智能体模拟器,将环境与种群规模扩展至前所未有的水平,实现超过60,000个智能体,每个拥有独立演化的神经网络策略。识别出多种涌现行为,如远距离资源获取、基于视觉的觅食与捕食,这些行为在竞争与生存压力下产生。我们分析感知模态与环境尺度对行为涌现的影响,发现部分行为仅在足够大的环境与种群中出现,且更大尺度能增强这些行为的稳定性与一致性。尽管进化设置已有丰富研究,但在现代硬件上的规模化结果为将生态作为机器学习工具开辟了新方向,尤其在计算资源日益充足的时代。实验代码见:https://github.com/jbejjani2022/ecological-emergent-behavior。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We explore how physical scale and population size shape the emergence of complex behaviors in open-ended ecological environments. In our setting, agents are unsupervised and have no explicit rewards or learning objectives but instead evolve over time according to reproduction, mutation, and selection. As they act, agents also shape their environment and the population around them in an ongoing dynamic ecology. Our goal is not to optimize a single high-performance policy, but instead to examine how behaviors emerge and evolve across large populations due to natural competition and environmental pressures. We use modern hardware along with a new multi-agent simulator to scale the environment and population to sizes much larger than previously attempted, reaching populations of over 60,000 agents, each with their own evolved neural network policy. We identify various emergent behaviors such as long-range resource extraction, vision-based foraging, and predation that arise under competitive and survival pressures. We examine how sensing modalities and environmental scale affect the emergence of these behaviors and find that some of them appear only in sufficiently large environments and populations, and that larger scales increase the stability and consistency of these emergent behaviors. While there is a rich history of research in evolutionary settings, our scaling results on modern hardware provide promising new directions to explore ecology as an instrument of machine learning in an era of increasingly abundant computational resources and efficient machine frameworks. Experimental code is available at https://github.com/jbejjani2022/ecological-emergent-behavior.
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