Feng Hui, Zeng Yi, Lu Enmeng
Research Center for Brain-Inspired Intelligence, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Front Comput Neurosci. 2022 Jul 18;16:784967. doi: 10.3389/fncom.2022.784967. eCollection 2022.
Affective empathy is an indispensable ability for humans and other species' harmonious social lives, motivating altruistic behavior, such as consolation and aid-giving. How to build an affective empathy computational model has attracted extensive attention in recent years. Most affective empathy models focus on the recognition and simulation of facial expressions or emotional speech of humans, namely Affective Computing. However, these studies lack the guidance of neural mechanisms of affective empathy. From a neuroscience perspective, affective empathy is formed gradually during the individual development process: experiencing own emotion-forming the corresponding Mirror Neuron System (MNS)-understanding the emotions of others through the mirror mechanism. Inspired by this neural mechanism, we constructed a brain-inspired affective empathy computational model, this model contains two submodels: (1) We designed an Artificial Pain Model inspired by the Free Energy Principle (FEP) to the simulate pain generation process in living organisms. (2) We build an affective empathy spiking neural network (AE-SNN) that simulates the mirror mechanism of MNS and has self-other differentiation ability. We apply the brain-inspired affective empathy computational model to the pain empathy and altruistic rescue task to achieve the rescue of companions by intelligent agents. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first one to reproduce the emergence process of mirror neurons and anti-mirror neurons in the SNN field. Compared with traditional affective empathy computational models, our model is more biologically plausible, and it provides a new perspective for achieving artificial affective empathy, which has special potential for the social robots field in the future.
情感共鸣是人类和其他物种和谐社会生活不可或缺的能力，它激发利他行为，如安慰和给予帮助。近年来，如何构建情感共鸣计算模型引起了广泛关注。大多数情感共鸣模型专注于人类面部表情或情感语音的识别与模拟，即情感计算。然而，这些研究缺乏情感共鸣神经机制的指导。从神经科学角度来看，情感共鸣在个体发育过程中逐渐形成：体验自身情感——形成相应的镜像神经元系统（MNS）——通过镜像机制理解他人情感。受此神经机制启发，我们构建了一个受大脑启发的情感共鸣计算模型，该模型包含两个子模型：（1）我们设计了一个受自由能原理（FEP）启发的人工疼痛模型，以模拟生物体中的疼痛产生过程。（2）我们构建了一个情感共鸣脉冲神经网络（AE-SNN），它模拟MNS的镜像机制并具有自我-他人区分能力。我们将受大脑启发的情感共鸣计算模型应用于疼痛共鸣和利他救援任务，以实现智能体对同伴的救援。据我们所知，我们的研究是首次在脉冲神经网络领域重现镜像神经元和反镜像神经元的出现过程。与传统情感共鸣计算模型相比，我们的模型在生物学上更具合理性，它为实现人工情感共鸣提供了新的视角，在未来的社交机器人领域具有特殊潜力。
