Paper ID: 2312.11414

The Animal-AI Environment: A Virtual Laboratory For Comparative Cognition and Artificial Intelligence Research

Konstantinos Voudouris, Ibrahim Alhas, Wout Schellaert, Matteo G. Mecattaf, Benjamin Slater, Matthew Crosby, Joel Holmes, John Burden, Niharika Chaubey, Niall Donnelly, Matishalin Patel, Marta Halina, José Hernández-Orallo, Lucy G. Cheke

The Animal-AI Environment is a unique game-based research platform designed to facilitate collaboration between the artificial intelligence and comparative cognition research communities. In this paper, we present the latest version of the Animal-AI Environment, outlining several major new features that make the game more engaging for humans and more complex for AI systems. New features include interactive buttons, reward dispensers, and player notifications, as well as an overhaul of the environment's graphics and processing for significant improvements in agent training time and quality of the human player experience. We provide detailed guidance on how to build computational and behavioural experiments with the Animal-AI Environment. We present results from a series of agents, including the state-of-the-art Deep Reinforcement Learning agent, Dreamer-v3, on newly designed tests and the Animal-AI Testbed of 900 tasks inspired by research in the field of comparative cognition. The Animal-AI Environment offers a new approach for modelling cognition in humans and non-human animals, and for building biologically-inspired artificial intelligence.

Submitted: Dec 18, 2023