Nature Communications (Nov 2023)

Learning few-shot imitation as cultural transmission

  • Avishkar Bhoopchand,
  • Bethanie Brownfield,
  • Adrian Collister,
  • Agustin Dal Lago,
  • Ashley Edwards,
  • Richard Everett,
  • Alexandre Fréchette,
  • Yanko Gitahy Oliveira,
  • Edward Hughes,
  • Kory W. Mathewson,
  • Piermaria Mendolicchio,
  • Julia Pawar,
  • Miruna Pȋslar,
  • Alex Platonov,
  • Evan Senter,
  • Sukhdeep Singh,
  • Alexander Zacherl,
  • Lei M. Zhang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-42875-2
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 1
pp. 1 – 14

Abstract

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Abstract Cultural transmission is the domain-general social skill that allows agents to acquire and use information from each other in real-time with high fidelity and recall. It can be thought of as the process that perpetuates fit variants in cultural evolution. In humans, cultural evolution has led to the accumulation and refinement of skills, tools and knowledge across generations. We provide a method for generating cultural transmission in artificially intelligent agents, in the form of few-shot imitation. Our agents succeed at real-time imitation of a human in novel contexts without using any pre-collected human data. We identify a surprisingly simple set of ingredients sufficient for generating cultural transmission and develop an evaluation methodology for rigorously assessing it. This paves the way for cultural evolution to play an algorithmic role in the development of artificial general intelligence.