Related papers: Weak universality in sensory tradeoffs

Models that can simulate how environments change in response to actions can be used by agents to plan and act efficiently. We improve on previous environment simulators from high-dimensional pixel observations by introducing recurrent…

Generalization to novel visual conditions remains a central challenge for both human and machine vision, yet standard robustness metrics offer limited insight into how systems trade accuracy for robustness. We introduce a…

Organisms adapt to volatile environments by integrating sensory information with internal memory, yet their information processing is constrained by resource limitations. Such limitations can fundamentally alter optimal estimation…

Sensory perception originates from the responses of sensory neurons, which react to a collection of sensory signals linked to various physical attributes of a singular perceptual object. Unraveling how the brain extracts perceptual…

Although species longevity is subject to a diverse range of selective forces, the mortality curves of a wide variety of organisms are rather similar. We argue that aging and its universal characteristics may have evolved by means of a…

Bacteria live in environments that are continuously fluctuating and changing. Exploiting any predictability of such fluctuations can lead to an increased fitness. On longer timescales bacteria can "learn" the structure of these fluctuations…

We consider a model for a population in a heterogeneous environment, with logistic type local population dynamics, under the assumption that individuals can switch between two different nonzero rates of diffusion. Such switching behavior…

Many biological populations exhibit diversity in their strategy for survival and reproduction in a given environment, and microbes are an example. We explore the fate of different strategies under sustained environmental change by…

The inheritance of characteristics induced by the environment has often been opposed to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Yet, while evolution by natural selection requires new heritable traits to be produced and transmitted, it…

Eukaryote genomes contain excessively introns, inter-genic and other non-genic sequences that appear to have no vital functional role or phenotype manifestation. Their existence, a long-standing puzzle, is viewed from the principle of…

Unambiguous identification of the rewards driving behaviours of entities operating in complex open-ended real-world environments is difficult, partly because goals and associated behaviours emerge endogenously and are dynamically updated as…

Cortical sensory neurons are known to be highly variable, in the sense that responses evoked by identical stimuli often change dramatically from trial to trial. The origin of this variability is uncertain, but it is usually interpreted as…

Many mathematical models of evolution assume that all individuals experience the same environment. Here, we study the Moran process in heterogeneous environments. The population is of finite size with two competing types, which are exposed…

Biological systems (among others) may respond to a large variety of distinct external stimuli, or signals. These perturbations will generally be presented to the system not singly, but in various combinations, so that a proper understanding…

We consider a population of agents competing for finite resources using strategies based on two channels of signals. The model is applicable to financial markets, ecosystems and computer networks. We find that the dynamics of the system is…

We investigate the competition dynamics of two microbial or viral strains that live in an environment that switches periodically between two states. One of the strains is adapted to the long-term environment, but pays a short-term cost,…

The theory of natural selection has two forms. Deductive theory describes how populations change over time. One starts with an initial population and some rules for change. From those assumptions, one calculates the future state of the…

We show how highly-diverse ecological communities may display persistent abundance fluctuations, when interacting through resource competition and subjected to migration from a species pool. This turns out to be closely related to the ratio…

We study the probabilities of evolution based on random mutations and natural selection. We conclude that evolution to multicellular eukaryots, or even prokaryots, is unlikely to be the result of only random mutations. Complex organisms…

Evolution has fascinated quantitative and physical scientists for decades: how can the random process of mutation, recombination, and duplication of genetic information generate the diversity of life? What determines the rate of evolution?…