Self-organizing Cognitive Models for Virtual Agents

Three key requirements of realistic characters or agents in virtual world can be identified as autonomy, interactivity, and personification. Working towards these challenges, this paper proposes a brain inspired agent architecture that integrates goal-directed autonomy, natural language interaction and human-like personification. Based on self-organizing neural models, the agent architecture maintains explicit mental representation of desires, intention, personalities, self-awareness, situation awareness and user awareness. Autonomous behaviors are generated via evaluating the current situation with active goals and learning the most appropriate social or goal-directed rule from the available knowledge, in accordance with the personality of each individual agent. We have built and deployed realistic agents in an interactive 3D virtual environment. Through an empirical user study, the results show that the agents are able to exhibit realistic human-like behavior, in terms of actions and interaction with the users, and are able to improve user experience in virtual environment.