Simulating fish autonomous swimming behaviours using deep reinforcement learning based on Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

The study of fish swimming behaviours and locomotion mechanisms holds significant scientific and engineering value. With the rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, a new method combining deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with computational fluid dynamics has emerged and been applied to simulate the fish's adaptive swimming behaviour, where the complex fish behaviour is decoupled to focus on the fish's response to the hydrodynamic field, and the simulation is driven by reward-based objectives to model the fish's swimming behaviour. However, the scale of this cross-disciplinary method is directly affected by the efficiency of the DRL model. To promote it to more general application scenarios, there is a pressing need for further research on more efficient and economical network architectures to address the challenge of approximating state-value function in high-dimensional, dynamic, and uncertain environments. Building upon a previously proposed computational platform for the simulation of fish autonomous swimming behaviour, we integrated Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks(KANs) and tested their performance in point-to-point swimming and Kármán gait swimming environments. Experimental results demonstrated that, compared to long short-term memory Networks(LSTMs) and multilayer perceptron networks(MLPs), the introduction of KANs significantly enhanced the perception and decision-making abilities of the intelligent fish in complex fluid environments. With a smaller network scale, in the point-to-point swimming case, KANs effectively approximated the state-value function, achieving average reward improvements of up to 88.0% and 94.1% over MLPs and LSTMs networks, respectively, and increased by 766.7% and 105.6% in the Kármán gait swimming case. Under comparable network sizes, the intelligent fish with KANs exhibited faster learning capabilities and more stable swimming performance in complex fluid settings.