Deep RL Needs Deep Behavior Analysis: Exploring Implicit Planning by Model-Free Agents in Open-Ended Environments

Understanding the behavior of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agents—particularly as task and agent sophistication increase—requires more than simple comparison of reward curves, yet standard methods for behavioral analysis remain underdeveloped in DRL. We apply tools from neuroscience and ethology to study DRL agents in a novel, complex, partially observable environment, ForageWorld, designed to capture key aspects of real-world animal foraging—including sparse, depleting resource patches, predator threats, and spatially extended arenas. We use this environment as a platform for applying joint behavioral and neural analysis to agents, revealing detailed, quantitatively grounded insights into agent strategies, memory, and planning. Contrary to common assumptions, we find that model-free RNN-based DRL agents can exhibit structured, planning-like behavior purely through emergent dynamics—without requiring explicit memory modules or world models. Our results show that studying DRL agents like animals—analyzing them with neuroethology-inspired tools that reveal structure in both behavior and neural dynamics—uncovers rich structure in their learning dynamics that would otherwise remain invisible. We distill these tools into a general analysis framework linking core behavioral and representational features to diagnostic methods, which can be reused for a wide range of tasks and agents. As agents grow more complex and autonomous, bridging neuroscience, cognitive science, and AI will be essential—not just for understanding their behavior, but for ensuring safe alignment and maximizing desirable behaviors that are hard to measure via reward. We show how this can be done by drawing on lessons from how biological intelligence is studied.