Related papers: Ignorance can be evolutionarily beneficial
A modelling framework, based on the theory of signal processing, for characterising the dynamics of systems driven by the unravelling of information is outlined, and is applied to describe the process of decision making. The model input of…
There is a strong link between the general concept of intelligence and the ability to collect and use information. The theory of Bayes-adaptive exploration offers an attractive optimality framework for training machines to perform complex…
Humans and animals explore their environment and acquire useful skills even in the absence of clear goals, exhibiting intrinsic motivation. The study of intrinsic motivation in artificial agents is concerned with the following question:…
Many life-history traits, like the age at maturity or adult longevity, are important determinants of the generation time. For instance, semelparous species whose adults reproduce once and die have shorter generation times than iteroparous…
Learning and decision-making in domains with naturally high noise-to-signal ratio, such as Finance or Healthcare, is often challenging, while the stakes are very high. In this paper, we study the problem of learning and acting under a…
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…
The human mind is capable of extraordinary achievements, yet it often appears to work against itself. It actively defends its cherished beliefs even in the face of contradictory evidence, conveniently interprets information to conform to…
Life emerged on the Earth within the first quintile of its habitable window, but a technological civilization did not blossom until its last. Efforts to infer the rate of abiogenesis, based on its early emergence, are frustrated by the…
Inverse analysis, such as model calibration, often suffers from a lack of informative data in complex real-world scenarios. The standard remedy, designing new experimental setups, is often costly and time-consuming, while readily available…
Can reproduction alone in the context of survival produce intelligence in our machines? In this work, self-replication is explored as a mechanism for the emergence of intelligent behavior in modern learning environments. By focusing purely…
In the classical Bayesian persuasion model an informed player and an uninformed one engage in a static interaction. The informed player, the sender, knows the state of nature, while the uninformed one, the receiver, does not. The informed…
Despite recent molecular technique improvements, biological knowledge remains incomplete. Reasoning on living systems hence implies to integrate heterogeneous and partial informations. Although current investigations successfully focus on…
The human intrinsic desire to pursue knowledge, also known as curiosity, is considered essential in the process of skill acquisition. With the aid of artificial curiosity, we could equip current techniques for control, such as Reinforcement…
In a previous study, we considered an information-theoretic model of code evolution. In it, agents obtain information about their (common) environment by the perception of messages of other agents, which is determined by an interaction…
Biological agents have meaningful interactions with their environment despite the absence of immediate reward signals. In such instances, the agent can learn preferred modes of behaviour that lead to predictable states -- necessary for…
Disgust is a basic emotion that serves to avoid contaminants, and is central to the behavioural immune system. While disgust-motivated avoidance occurs in bonobos and chimpanzees, humans show uniquely high levels of contamination…
We develop a result on expected posteriors for Bayesians with heterogenous priors, dubbed information validates the prior (IVP). Under familiar ordering requirements, Anne expects a (Blackwell) more informative experiment to bring Bob's…
Expression level is known to be a strong determinant of a protein's rate of evolution. But the converse can also be true: evolutionary dynamics can affect expression levels of proteins. Having implications in both directions fosters the…
Despite the obvious advantage of simple life forms capable of fast replication, different levels of cognitive complexity have been achieved by living systems in terms of their potential to cope with environmental uncertainty. Against the…
We study a Bayesian persuasion setting with binary actions (adopt and reject) for Receiver. We examine the following question - how well can Sender perform, in terms of persuading Receiver to adopt, when ignorant of Receiver's utility? We…