Empowerment -- a domain independent, information-theoretic metric -- has previously been shown to assist in the evolutionary search for neural cellular automata (NCA) capable of homeostasis when employed as a fitness function. In our previous study, we successfully extended empowerment, defined as maximum time-lagged mutual information between agents' actions and future sensations, to a distributed sensorimotor system embodied as an NCA. However, the time-delay between actions and their corresponding sensations was arbitrarily chosen. Here, we expand upon previous work by exploring how the time scale at which empowerment operates impacts its efficacy as an auxiliary objective to accelerate the discovery of homeostatic NCAs. We show that shorter time delays result in marked improvements over empowerment with longer delays, when compared to evolutionary selection only for homeostasis. Moreover, we evaluate stability and adaptability of evolved NCAs, both hallmarks of living systems that are of interest to replicate in artificial ones. We find that short-term empowered NCA are more stable and are capable of generalizing better to unseen homeostatic challenges. Taken together, these findings motivate the use of empowerment during the evolution of other artifacts, and suggest how it should be incorporated to accelerate evolution of desired behaviors for them. Source code for the experiments in this paper can be found at: https://github.com/caitlingrasso/empowered-nca-II.

本文研究了授权度量的时间尺度对其作为辅助目标加速NCA自我平衡的发现的影响，发现在短期内授权的NCA更加稳定且能够更好地适应未见的自我平衡挑战。

短期增强选择加速了体内稳态神经细胞自动机的进化