Intrinsic Motivation in Reinforcement Learning: A Research Agenda for Adaptive Self-Organisation

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Biological cells can be viewed as individual, interacting agents whose collective dynamics give rise to adaptive behaviour at multiple levels of organisation, from individual cells through tissues to whole multicellular organisms. In this perspective and tutorial article we discuss whether intrinsic rewards in artificial neural systems can support adaptation, functional specialisation and higher-level self-organisation without a shared external objective. We review empowerment, curiosity, learning progress, information gain, unsupervised skill discovery, mutual information estimation and the use of world models for intrinsic reward computation. Particular attention is given to failure modes showing when such objectives do not produce sustained exploration or increasingly complex behaviour. We argue that more capable systems may require complementary objectives, communication, memory, learning at multiple temporal scales and environmental constraints. Based on this perspective, we outline three experimental directions. These include a resource-constrained environment in which otherwise stable behavioural attractors become unsustainable, allowing us to test whether environmental constraints can mitigate characteristic failure modes of intrinsic objectives. The network of recurrent agents with per-agent intrinsic rewards, and a hierarchical world-model agent in which exploratory motor competence develops before goal-directed behaviour. These experiments are intended to test whether intrinsic learning can lead to adaptive organisation at progressively higher levels.