Augmenting neuro-evolutionary adaptation with representations does not incur a speed accuracy trade-off

Representations, or sensor-independent internal models of the environment, are important for any type of intelligent agent to process and act in an environment. Imbuing an artificially intelligent system with such a model of the world it functions in remains a difficult problem. However, using neuro-evolution as the means to optimize such a system allows the artificial intelligence to evolve proper models of the environment. Previous work has found an information-theoretic measure, R, which measures how much information a neural computational architecture (henceforth loosely referred to as a brain) has about its environment, and can additionally be used speed up the neuro-evolutionary process. However, it is possible that this improved evolutionary adaptation comes at a cost to the brain's ability to generalize or the brain's robustness to noise. In this paper, we show that this is not the case; to the contrary, we find an improved ability of the to evolve in noisy environments when the neuro-correlate R is used to augment evolutionary adaptation.