Inference of other’s internal neural models from active observation

Recently, there have been several attempts to replicate theory of mind, which explains how humans infer the mental states of other people using multiple sensory input, with artificial systems. One example of this is a robot that observes the behavior of other artificial systems and infers their internal models, mapping sensory inputs to the actuator’s control signals. In this paper, we present the internal model as an artificial neural network, similar to biological systems. During inference, an observer can use an active incremental learning algorithm to guess an actor’s internal neural model. This could significantly reduce the effort needed to guess other people’s internal models. We apply an algorithm to the actor–observer robot scenarios with/without prior knowledge of the internal models. To validate our approach, we use a physics-based simulator with virtual robots. A series of experiments reveal that the observer robot can construct an “other’s self-model”, validating the possibility that a neural-based approach can be used as a platform for learning cognitive functions.