Related papers: Optimizing the search for resources by sharing inf…

Imitation is an important learning heuristic in animal and human societies. Previous explorations report that the fate of individuals with cooperative strategies is sensitive to the protocol of imitation, leading to a conundrum about how…

We consider the information design problem in spatial resource competition settings. Agents gather at a location deciding whether to move to another location for possibly higher level of resources, and the utility each agent gets by moving…

In many situations, communication between agents is a critical component of cooperative multi-agent systems, however, it can be difficult to learn or evolve. In this paper, we investigate a simple way in which the emergence of communication…

Interactions among individuals from the same-species of wild animals are an important component of population dynamics. An interaction can be either static (based on overlap of space use) or dynamic (based on movement). The goal of this…

Despite having been studied for decades, first passage processes remain an active area of research. In this contribution we examine a particle diffusing in an annulus with an inner absorbing boundary and an outer reflective boundary. We…

Dialogue data in real scenarios tend to be sparsely available, rendering data-starved end-to-end dialogue systems trained inadequately. We discover that data utilization efficiency in low-resource scenarios can be enhanced by mining…

Bayesian model-based reinforcement learning is a formally elegant approach to learning optimal behaviour under model uncertainty, trading off exploration and exploitation in an ideal way. Unfortunately, finding the resulting Bayes-optimal…

Determining spatial distributions of species and communities are key objectives of ecology and conservation. Joint species distribution models use multi-species detection-nondetection data to estimate species and community distributions.…

Distributed learning and adaptation have received significant interest and found wide-ranging applications in machine learning and signal processing. While various approaches, such as shared-memory optimization, multi-task learning, and…

Swarm intelligence is a research field that models the collective behavior in swarms of insects or animals. Several algorithms arising from such models have been proposed to solve a wide range of complex optimization problems. In this…

Scarce data is a major challenge to scaling robot learning to truly complex tasks, as we need to generalize locally learned policies over different "contexts". Bayesian optimization approaches to contextual policy search (CPS) offer…

We study how the amount of correlation between observations collected by distinct sensors/learners affects data collection and collaboration strategies by analyzing Fisher information and the Cramer-Rao bound. In particular, we consider a…

In real life situations often paired comparisons involving alternatives of either full or partial profiles to mitigate cognitive burden are presented. For this situation the problem of finding optimal designs is considered in the presence…

Designing navigation strategies for search time optimization remains of interest in various interdisciplinary branches in science. In here, we focus on microscopic self-propelled searchers namely active Brownian walkers in noisy and…

Communication remains the most significant bottleneck in the performance of distributed optimization algorithms for large-scale machine learning. In this paper, we propose a communication-efficient framework, CoCoA, that uses local…

In animal behavior studies, a common goal is to investigate the causal pathways between an exposure and outcome, and a mediator that lies in between. Causal mediation analysis provides a principled approach for such studies. Although many…

We consider the problem of search through comparisons, where a user is presented with two candidate objects and reveals which is closer to her intended target. We study adaptive strategies for finding the target, that require knowledge of…

This paper combines the idea of a hierarchical distributed genetic algorithm with different inter-agent partnering strategies. Cascading clusters of sub-populations are built from bottom up, with higher-level sub-populations optimising…

We present a simple model to study L\'{e}vy-flight foraging in a finite landscape with countable targets. In our approach, foraging is a step-based exploratory random search process with a power-law step-size distribution $P(l) \propto…

Local coexistence of species in large ecosystems is traditionally explained within the broad framework of niche theory. However, its rationale hardly justifies rich biodiversity observed in nearly homogeneous environments. Here we consider…