Related papers: Sensing and decision-making in random search

Many applications in machine learning require optimizing a function whose true gradient is unknown, but where surrogate gradient information (directions that may be correlated with, but not necessarily identical to, the true gradient) is…

Understanding how humans evaluate robot behavior during human-robot interactions is crucial for developing socially aware robots that behave according to human expectations. While the traditional approach to capturing these evaluations is…

Surveillance and exploration of large environments is a tedious task. In spaces with limited environmental cues, random-like search is an effective approach as it allows the robot to perform online coverage of environments using simple…

Inspection of infrastructure using static sensor nodes has become a well established approach in recent decades. In this work, we present an experimental setup to address a binary inspection task using mobile sensor nodes. The objective is…

Eliciting information to reduce uncertainty about a latent entity is a critical task in many application domains, e.g., assessing individual student learning outcomes, diagnosing underlying diseases, or learning user preferences. Though…

Supervisory signals are a critical resource for training learning to rank models. In many real-world search and retrieval scenarios, these signals may not be readily available or could be costly to obtain for some queries. The examples…

Computational models of managerial search often build on backward-looking search based on hill-climbing algorithms. Regardless of its prevalence, there is some evidence that this family of algorithms does not universally represent managers'…

To make informed decisions in natural environments that change over time, humans must update their beliefs as new observations are gathered. Studies exploring human inference as a dynamical process that unfolds in time have focused on…

Collective motion provides a spectacular example of self-organization in Nature. Visual information plays a crucial role among various types of information in determining interactions. Recently, experiments have revealed that organisms such…

To survive in dynamic and uncertain environments, individuals must develop effective decision strategies that balance information gathering and decision commitment. Models of such strategies often prioritize either optimizing tangible…

Reasoning models improve their problem-solving ability through inference-time scaling, allocating more compute via longer token budgets. Identifying which reasoning traces are likely to succeed remains a key opportunity: reliably predicting…

Despite the widespread use of gradient-based algorithms for optimizing high-dimensional non-convex functions, understanding their ability of finding good minima instead of being trapped in spurious ones remains to a large extent an open…

The problem of detecting a few anomalous processes among a large number of data streams is considered. At each time, aggregated observations can be taken from a chosen subset of the processes, where the chosen subset conforms to a given…

Web search provides a promising way for people to obtain information and has been extensively studied. With the surgence of deep learning and large-scale pre-training techniques, various neural information retrieval models are proposed and…

It is argued based on the results of both numerical modelling and the experiments performed on an artificial substitute of a meadow that the sound emitted by animals living in a dense surrounding such as a meadow or shrubs can be used as a…

Reinforcement learning algorithms struggle when the reward signal is very sparse. In these cases, naive random exploration methods essentially rely on a random walk to stumble onto a rewarding state. Recent works utilize intrinsic…

Randomized sampling based algorithms are widely used in robot motion planning due to the problem's intractability, and are experimentally effective on a wide range of problem instances. Most variants bias their sampling using various…

Frequently one has to search within a finite population for a single particular individual or item with a rare characteristic. Whether an item possesses the characteristic can only be determined by close inspection. The availability of…

Information theory has explained the organization of many biological phenomena, from the physiology of sensory receptive fields to the variability of certain DNA sequence ensembles. Some scholars have proposed that information should…

Signal retrieval from a series of indirect measurements is a common task in many imaging, metrology and characterization platforms in science and engineering. Because most of the indirect measurement processes are well-described by physical…