Related papers: Sensing and decision-making in random search
Contextual policy search allows adapting robotic movement primitives to different situations. For instance, a locomotion primitive might be adapted to different terrain inclinations or desired walking speeds. Such an adaptation is often…
Recent empirical and modeling research has focused on the semantic fluency task because it is informative about semantic memory. An interesting interplay arises between the richness of representations in semantic memory and the complexity…
Many studies on animal and human movement patterns report the existence of scaling laws and power-law distributions. Whereas a number of random walk models have been proposed to explain observations, in many situations individuals actually…
Recent work has attempted to characterize the structure of semantic memory and the search algorithms which, together, best approximate human patterns of search revealed in a semantic fluency task. There are a number of models that seek to…
Enabling robots to learn novel visuomotor skills in a data-efficient manner remains an unsolved problem with myriad challenges. A popular paradigm for tackling this problem is through leveraging large unlabeled datasets that have many…
The performance of sensor arrays in sensing and wireless communications improves with more elements, but this comes at the cost of increased energy consumption and hardware expense. This work addresses the challenge of selecting $k$ sensor…
We model search in settings where decision makers know what can be found but not where to find it. A searcher faces a set of choices arranged by an observable attribute. Each period, she either selects a choice and pays a cost to learn…
Autonomous systems can be used to search for sparse signals in a large space; e.g., aerial robots can be deployed to localize threats, detect gas leaks, or respond to distress calls. Intuitively, search algorithms may increase efficiency by…
The vast amounts of data collected in various domains pose great challenges to modern data exploration and analysis. To find "interesting" objects in large databases, users typically define a query using positive and negative example…
Random walks have been proposed as a simple method of efficiently searching, or disseminating information throughout, communication and sensor networks. In nature, animals (such as ants) tend to follow correlated random walks, i.e., random…
Strongly non-Markovian random walks offer a promising modeling framework for understanding animal and human mobility, yet, few analytical results are available for these processes. Here we solve exactly a model with long range memory where…
Many organisms navigate gradients by alternating straight motions (runs) with random reorientations (tumbles), transiently suppressing tumbles whenever attractant signal increases. This induces a functional coupling between movement and…
Extending the intelligence of sensors to the data-acquisition process - deciding whether to sample or not - can result in transformative energy-efficiency gains. However, making such a decision in a deterministic manner involves risk of…
To identify the location of objects of a particular class, a passive computer vision system generally processes all the regions in an image to finally output few regions. However, we can use structure in the scene to search for objects…
Visual search is a fundamental natural task for humans and other animals. We investigated the decision processes humans use in covert (single-fixation) search with briefly presented displays having well-separated potential target locations.…
Search and recommendation (S&R) are fundamental components of modern online platforms, yet effectively leveraging search behaviors to improve recommendation remains a challenging problem. User search histories often contain noisy or…
Active sensing is traditionally defined as the expenditure of energy, typically in the form of movement, for obtaining information. Here, we propose that the combination of reliance on adaptive sensors, the linkage between movement and…
The mammalian olfactory system learns rapidly from very few examples, presented in unpredictable online sequences, and then recognizes these learned odors under conditions of substantial interference without exhibiting catastrophic…
An efficient searcher needs to balance properly the tradeoff between the exploration of new spatial areas and the exploitation of nearby resources, an idea which is at the core of scale-free L\'evy search strategies. Here we study…
Advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly improved multi-step reasoning through generating free-text rationales. However, recent studies show that LLMs tend to lose focus over the middle of long contexts. This raises…