在动态环境中,拉马克遗传能提升机器人进化性能。
Lamarckian Inheritance in Dynamic Environments: How Key Variables Affect Evolutionary Dynamics

- 用拉马克遗传将学习到的控制参数传给后代,结合形态与控制优化。
- 当环境变化冲突且不可预测时,拉马克遗传反而不如达尔文遗传。
- 加传感器可让机器人预判变化,恢复拉马克遗传的优势,适合动态场景研究者。
机器人身体与大脑的协同优化面临耦合挑战:形态限制有效控制策略,而控制决定形态表现。本文将形态优化视为进化,控制优化视为终身学习,利用拉马克遗传将父代学习到的控制器参数传递给子代。在动态环境中,既有文献存在矛盾结论:传统进化理论认为拉马克遗传无益,但近期进化机器人研究显示其可提升性能。我们假设此前研究未涵盖动态环境中的关键变量。本工作表明,拉马克遗传的收益取决于两个变量:环境变化对机器人控制的冲突程度,以及变化的可预测性。通过虚拟软体机器人和贝叶斯优化、强化学习两种方法,我们发现仅当变化同时冲突且不可预测时,拉马克遗传才劣于达尔文遗传。加入检测环境变化的传感器后,可在冲突环境中恢复拉马克遗传优势,使机器人提前预判行为需求,实现控制泛化。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The co-optimization of a robot's body and brain presents a coupled challenge: the morphology constrains which control strategies are effective, while the control determines how well the morphology performs. To address this, we combine morphology optimization as evolution with controller optimization as lifetime learning, utilizing Lamarckian inheritance to transfer learned controller parameters from parent to offspring. In dynamic environments, existing literature presents conflicting evidence: while traditional evolutionary theory often suggests Lamarckian inheritance lacks benefit, recent studies in evolutionary robotics indicate it can improve performance. We hypothesize that this is because previous works have not included all relevant variables with dynamic environments. In this work, we show that the benefit of Lamarckian inheritance depends on two variables: how conflicting the environmental changes are to robot control, and the predictability of those changes for the robotic agent. Using virtual soft robots and two different learning approaches, Bayesian optimization and reinforcement learning, we show that Lamarckian inheritance only underperforms Darwinian inheritance when the changes are both conflicting and unpredictable. We find that adding a sensor to detect environmental changes restores the benefits for Lamarckian inheritance in conflicting environments, by allowing robotic agents to predict the need for a different behavior, thereby generalizing their control.
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