Artificial Generational Intelligence: Cultural Accumulation in Reinforcement Learning

Cultural accumulation drives the open-ended progress in capabilities spanning human history. It builds an expanding body of knowledge and skills by combining individual exploration with inter-generational information transmission. Despite its widespread success among humans, the capacity for artificial learning agents to accumulate culture remains under-explored. In particular, approaches to reinforcement learning typically strive for improvements over only a single lifetime. Generational algorithms that do exist fail to capture the open-ended, emergent nature of cultural accumulation, which allows individuals to trade-off innovation and imitation. Building on the previously demonstrated ability for reinforcement learning agents to perform social learning, we find that training setups which balance this with independent learning give rise to cultural accumulation. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to present general models that achieve emergent cultural accumulation in reinforcement learning, presenting new routes to more open-ended learning systems, as well as new opportunities for modelling human culture.