# Whole-brain recordings in fruit flies and a neuromechanical digital twin: how intrinsic goals in hierarchical exploration capture future volitional action

- Source: arXiv cs.RO
- Published: 2026-10-27T04:00:00.000Z
- RoboHot: https://robohot.news/en/items/cmrs61uww11j5ru0gdo3dcq3j
- Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.34638

## Summary

The study combines whole-brain recordings in fruit flies with a neuromechanical digital twin to test whether agents trained with intrinsic motivation algorithms can reproduce the fly's spontaneous exploratory behavior in a virtual tethered-ball experiment. Agents select actions from a discrete library of low-level motor primitives and are trained without external reward using 20 intrinsic motivation algorithms; among them, DIAYN came closest to the fly in behavior and neural prospective encoding, and reproduced the additive and subtractive rules of interhemispheric kinematic encoding.