Adaptive Intelligence: leveraging insights from adaptive behavior in animals to build flexible AI systems

Biological intelligence is inherently adaptive—animals continually adjust their actions in response to environmental feedback. However, creating adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) remains a major challenge. The next frontier is to go beyond traditional AI to develop ‘adaptive intelligence’, defined here as harnessing insights from biological intelligence to build agents that can learn online, generalize and rapidly adapt to changes in their environment. Recent advances in neuroscience offer inspiration through studies that increasingly focus on how animals naturally learn and adapt their models of the world. This Perspective reviews the behavioral and neural foundations of adaptive biological intelligence, examines parallel progress in AI, and explores brain-inspired approaches for building more adaptive algorithms. Adaptive intelligence envisions AI that, like animals, learns online, generalizes and adapts quickly. This Perspective reviews biological foundations, progress in AI and brain-inspired strategies for building flexible and adaptive AI algorithms.