{"slug": "intrinsic-goals-for-autonomous-agents-hierarchical-exploration-captures-future", "title": "Intrinsic Goals for Autonomous Agents: Hierarchical Exploration Captures Future Volitional Action in Drosophila", "summary": "A study combining whole-brain recordings in the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) reports that hierarchical exploration captures future volitional action, offering a computational account of how animals act autonomously without external sensory cues or extrinsic objectives. The research frames this autonomy as driven by intrinsic motivation and states that the mechanisms behind it have largely remained a mystery. The work is presented as an effort to explain intrinsic goals for autonomous agents.", "body_md": "Animals have a remarkable capacity for autonomy---driven by intrinsic motivation---without external sensory cues or extrinsic objectives, yet the computational mechanisms behind this ability largely remain a mystery. We combine whole-brain recordings in the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster), which", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/intrinsic-goals-for-autonomous-agents-hierarchical-exploration-captures-future", "canonical_source": "https://aiflash.com/news/140524/", "published_at": "2026-10-27 15:06:12+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-10-27 15:13:41.752328+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-research", "neural-networks", "machine-learning"], "entities": ["Drosophila melanogaster"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/intrinsic-goals-for-autonomous-agents-hierarchical-exploration-captures-future", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/intrinsic-goals-for-autonomous-agents-hierarchical-exploration-captures-future.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/intrinsic-goals-for-autonomous-agents-hierarchical-exploration-captures-future.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/intrinsic-goals-for-autonomous-agents-hierarchical-exploration-captures-future.jsonld"}}