Neural Circuit Architectural Priors for Quadruped Locomotion
Keywords: neuroscience, neural circuits, motor control
TL;DR: We show that a bio-inspired ANN architecture based on mammalian neural circuits can be a powerful prior for quadruped robot locomotion
Abstract: Learning-based approaches to quadruped locomotion commonly adopt generic policy architectures like fully connected MLPs. As such architectures contain few inductive biases, it is in practice common to incorporate priors in the form of rewards, training curricula, imitation data, or trajectory generators. In nature, animals are born with priors in the form of their nervous system's architecture, which has been shaped by evolution to confer innate ability and efficient learning. For instance, a horse can walk within hours of birth and can quickly improve with practice. Such architectural priors can also be useful in ANN architectures for AI. In this work, we explore the advantages of a biologically inspired ANN architecture for quadruped locomotion based on neural circuits in the limbs and spinal cord of mammals. Our architecture achieves good innate performance and comparable final performance to MLPs, while using less data and orders of magnitude fewer parameters. Our architecture also exhibits better generalization to task variations, even admitting deployment on a physical robot without standard sim-to-real methods. This work shows that neural circuits can provide valuable architectural priors for locomotion and encourages future work in other sensorimotor skills.
Primary Area: applications to neuroscience & cognitive science
Code Of Ethics: I acknowledge that I and all co-authors of this work have read and commit to adhering to the ICLR Code of Ethics.
Submission Guidelines: I certify that this submission complies with the submission instructions as described on https://iclr.cc/Conferences/2025/AuthorGuide.
Anonymous Url: I certify that there is no URL (e.g., github page) that could be used to find authors’ identity.
No Acknowledgement Section: I certify that there is no acknowledgement section in this submission for double blind review.
Submission Number: 7067
Loading