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This paper investigates the transferability of co-evolved communication protocols from a 2D discrete simulator to a 3D physics-based environment, finding that success rates scale linearly with episode time budget up to 6,000 steps. The social cue primarily acts as jam-assistance, with a stronger effect in 2D, and consistent role asymmetry emerges across evolutionary runs. The study identifies factors contributing to the performance gap post-transfer, suggesting shorter evaluations may underestimate agent capabilities.
Co-evolved communication protocols exhibit surprising robustness when transferred from 2D to 3D physics, with performance scaling linearly with episode length and social cues acting predominantly as jam-assistance.
This work examines the transfer of a co-evolved communication mechanism between two robotic agents from a discrete two-dimensional (2D) simulator to a three-dimensional simulator with real physics (3D). The study focuses on whether a communication mechanism co-evolved in a 2D environment retains its functional role after transfer to a 3D physics-based simulator. To support this analysis, the effects of the episode time budget, the social cue, and the asymmetry between the two co-evolved roles were examined. The results indicate that the success rate increased approximately linearly with the evaluated time budgets, with no evidence of a plateau between 2,000 and 6,000 physics steps, suggesting that evaluations based on shorter episodes may underestimate the performance of the trained controllers. In both simulators, the social cue functioned primarily as a jam- assistance mechanism rather than as a navigation guide, although with a more pronounced effect in 2D. Analysis of eight independent evolutionary runs revealed a consistent direction of asymmetry, although its magnitude varied across runs. Controlling the processing order between agents allowed us to rule out an artifact of the physics engine. Finally, the results are discussed in terms of the factors that may contribute to the remaining performance gap observed after transfer.
