Related papers: Learning Criticality in an Embodied Boltzmann Mach…
Recent physiological measurements have provided clear evidence about scale-free avalanche brain activity and EEG spectra, feeding the classical enigma of how such a chaotic system can ever learn or respond in a controlled and reproducible…
Spatial reasoning in partially observable environments has often been approached through passive predictive models, yet theories of embodied cognition suggest that genuinely useful representations arise only when perception is tightly…
Observations of power laws in neural activity data have raised the intriguing notion that brains may operate in a critical state. One example of this critical state is "avalanche criticality," which has been observed in various systems,…
Empirical evidence of scaling behaviors in neuronal avalanches suggests that neuronal populations in the brain operate near criticality. Departure from scaling in neuronal avalanches has been used as a measure of distance to criticality and…
We investigate the thermodynamic properties of a Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM), a simple energy-based generative model used in the context of unsupervised learning. Assuming the information content of this model to be mainly reflected…
As robots venture into the real world, they are subject to unmodeled dynamics and disturbances. Traditional model-based control approaches have been proven successful in relatively static and known operating environments. However, when an…
While Hopfield networks are known as paradigmatic models for memory storage and retrieval, modern artificial intelligence systems mainly stand on the machine learning paradigm. We show that it is possible to formulate a teacher-student…
This Thesis explores how tools from Statistical Physics and Information Theory can help us describe and understand complex systems. In the first part, we study the interplay between internal interactions, environmental changes, and…
In this paper we study a simple model of a purely excitatory neural network that, by construction, operates at a critical point. This model allows us to consider various markers of criticality and illustrate how they should perform in a…
Embodied systems, where generative autonomous agents engage with the physical world through integrated perception, cognition, action, and advanced reasoning powered by large language models (LLMs), hold immense potential for addressing…
Boolean Networks have been used to study numerous phenomena, including gene regulation, neural networks, social interactions, and biological evolution. Here, we propose a general method for determining the critical behavior of Boolean…
Embodied artificial intelligence emphasizes the role of an agent's body in generating human-like behaviors. The recent efforts on EmbodiedAI pay a lot of attention to building up machine learning models to possess perceiving, planning, and…
The restricted Boltzmann machine (RBM) is a two-layer energy-based model that uses its hidden-visible connections to learn the underlying distribution of visible units, whose interactions are often complicated by high-order correlations.…
Imitation learning is a promising approach to end-to-end training of autonomous vehicle controllers. Typically the driving process with such approaches is entirely automatic and black-box, although in practice it is desirable to control the…
In order to effectively interact with or supervise a robot, humans need to have an accurate mental model of its capabilities and how it acts. Learned neural network policies make that particularly challenging. We propose an approach for…
In this work we explore encoding strategies learned by statistical models of sensory coding in noisy spiking networks. Early stages of sensory communication in neural systems can be viewed as encoding channels in the information-theoretic…
In this paper, we will argue that if we want to understand the function of the brain (or the control in the case of robots), we must understand how the brain is embedded into the physical system, and how the organism interacts with the real…
Living systems operate in a critical dynamical regime -- between order and chaos -- where they are both resilient to perturbation, and flexible enough to evolve. To characterize such critical dynamics, the established 'structural theory' of…
The technology for autonomous vehicles is close to replacing human drivers by artificial systems endowed with high-level decision-making capabilities. In this regard, systems must learn about the usual vehicle's behavior to predict imminent…
The reasoning capabilities of embodied agents introduce a critical, under-explored inferential privacy challenge, where the risk of an agent generate sensitive conclusions from ambient data. This capability creates a fundamental tension…