title: Needs, Pains, and Motivations in Autonomous Agents.
abstract: This paper presents the development of a motivated learning (ML) agent with symbolic I/O. Our earlier work on the ML agent was enhanced, giving it autonomy for interaction with other agents. Specifically, we equipped the agent with drives and pains that establish its motivations to learn how to respond to desired and undesired events and create related abstract goals. The purpose of this paper is to explore the autonomous development of motivations and memory in agents within a simulated environment. The ML agent has been implemented in a virtual environment created within the NeoAxis game engine. Additionally, to illustrate the benefits of an ML-based agent, we compared the performance of our algorithm against various reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in a dynamic test scenario, and demonstrated that our ML agent learns better than any of the tested RL agents.This paper presents the development of a motivated learning (ML) agent with symbolic I/O. Our earlier work on the ML agent was enhanced, giving it autonomy for interaction with other agents. Specifically, we equipped the agent with drives and pains that establish its motivations to learn how to respond to desired and undesired events and create related abstract goals. The purpose of this paper is to explore the autonomous development of motivations and memory in agents within a simulated environment. The ML agent has been implemented in a virtual environment created within the NeoAxis game engine. Additionally, to illustrate the benefits of an ML-based agent, we compared the performance of our algorithm against various reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in a dynamic test scenario, and demonstrated that our ML agent learns better than any of the tested RL agents.
authors.affiliation: Russ College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA.
authors.forename: Janusz A
authors.initials: JA
authors.lastname: Starzyk
authors.affiliation: Russ College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Ohio University, Athens, OH, USA.
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Graham
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science and Management, University of Information Technology and Management, Rzeszów, Poland.
authors.forename: Leszek
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Puzio
keywords: Cognition; Computer architecture; Computer science; Heuristic algorithms; Learning systems; Pain; Robots