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A strong preference for novelty emerges in infancy and is prevalent across the animal kingdom. When incorporated into reinforcement-based machine learning algorithms, visual novelty can act as an intrinsic reward signal that vastly…

In the real world, RL agents should be rewarded for fulfilling human preferences. We show that RL agents implicitly learn the preferences of humans in their environment. Training a classifier to predict if a simulated human's preferences…

We investigated motor skill learning using a path tracking task, where human subjects had to track various curved paths as fast as possible, in the absence of any external perturbations. Subjects became better with practice, producing…

Recent experimental results based on multi-electrode and imaging techniques have reinvigorated the idea that large neural networks operate near a critical point, between order and disorder. However, evidence for criticality has relied on…

One of the hallmarks of biological organisms is their ability to integrate disparate information sources to optimize their behavior in complex environments. How this capability can be quantified and related to the functional complexity of…

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a promising approach for teaching robots new behaviour. However, one of its main limitations is the need for carefully hand-coded reward signals by an expert. We argue that it is crucial to automate the…

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities, yet aligning such abilities to small language models (SLMs) remains a challenge due to distributional mismatches and limited model capacity. Existing reasoning…

Extracellular recordings of single neurons in primary and secondary somatosensory cortices of monkeys in vivo have shown that their firing rate can increase, decrease, or remain constant in different cells, as the external stimulus…

This paper presents a Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) based system for reasoning about high speed motion. As a representative scenario, we consider the case of a robot at rest reacting to a small, fast approaching object at speeds higher than…

Learning from human feedback has shown to be a useful approach in acquiring robot reward functions. However, expert feedback is often assumed to be drawn from an underlying unimodal reward function. This assumption does not always hold…

Sensory neuroscience seeks to understand how the brain encodes natural environments. However, neural coding has largely been studied using simplified stimuli. In order to assess whether the brain's coding strategy depend on the stimulus…

Feedback controlled ratchets are thermal rectifiers that use information on the state of the system to operate. We study the effects of time delays in the feedback for a protocol that performs an instantaneous maximization of the…

Mammalian sleep is characterized by multiple alternations between episodes of rapid-eye-movement sleep (REMS) and non-REM sleep (NREMS). While the mechanisms governing the timing of these ultradian NREMS-REMS cycles remain poorly…

A multi-modal machine learning system uses multiple unique data sources and types to improve its performance. This article proposes a system that combines results from several types of models, all of which are trained on different data…

Humans have needs motivating their behavior according to intensity and context. However, we also create preferences associated with each action's perceived pleasure, which is susceptible to changes over time. This makes decision-making more…

Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) has been successful in learning sophisticated behaviors automatically; however, the learning process requires a huge number of trials. In contrast, animals can learn new tasks in just a few trials,…

Our goal in this paper is to plan the motion of a robot in a partitioned environment with dynamically changing, locally sensed rewards. We assume that arbitrary assumptions on the reward dynamics can be given. The robot aims to accomplish a…

Recent advances in the field of machine learning have led to new ways for mobile robots to acquire advanced navigational capabilities. However, these learning-based methods raise the possibility that learned navigation behaviors may not…

While Artificial Intelligence has successfully outperformed humans in complex combinatorial games (such as chess and checkers), humans have retained their supremacy in social interactions that require intuition and adaptation, such as…

Designing reward functions for continuous-control robotics often leads to subtle misalignments or reward hacking, especially in complex tasks. Preference-based RL mitigates some of these pitfalls by learning rewards from comparative…