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Bayesian (Probabilistic) Machine Learning is used to probe the opacity of the Universe. It relies on a generative process where the model is the key object to generate the data involving the unknown parameters of the model, our prior…
Beyond representing the external world, humans also represent their own cognitive processes. In the context of perception, this metacognition helps us identify unreliable percepts, such as when we recognize that we are seeing an illusion.…
Human perception of the empirical world involves recognizing the diverse appearances, or 'modalities', of underlying objects. Despite the longstanding consideration of this perspective in philosophy and cognitive science, the study of…
This paper is a shortened version of the full paper that was published in the journal Frontiers of Psychology in May 2022. In recent decades, the scientific study of consciousness has significantly increased our understanding of this…
Why does our visual system fail to reconstruct reality, when we look at certain patterns? Where do Geometrical illusions start to emerge in the visual pathway? How far should we take computational models of vision with the same visual…
A mildly inhomogeneous universe with a cosmological constant may look like it contains evolving dark energy. We show that could be the case by modelling the inhomogeneities and their effects in three different ways: as clumped matter…
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are trained on vast amounts of data captured by humans emulating our understanding of the world. However, known as visual illusions, human's perception of reality isn't always faithful to the physical world.…
Recent self-supervised learning models simulate the development of semantic object representations by training on visual experience similar to that of toddlers. However, these models ignore the foveated nature of human vision with high/low…
Humans have a remarkable ability to use physical commonsense and predict the effect of collisions. But do they understand the underlying factors? Can they predict if the underlying factors have changed? Interestingly, in most cases humans…
An effective technique for obtaining high-quality representations is adding a projection head on top of the encoder during training, then discarding it and using the pre-projection representations. Despite its proven practical…
The Moon is generally thought to have formed from the debris ejected by the impact of a planet-sized object with the proto-Earth towards the end of planetary accretion. Modeling of the impact process predicts that the lunar material was…
Visual illusions allow researchers to devise and test new models of visual perception. Here we show that artificial neural networks trained for basic visual tasks in natural images are deceived by brightness and color illusions, having a…
Why do we sometimes perceive static images as if they were moving? Visual motion illusions enjoy a sustained popularity, yet there is no definitive answer to the question of why they work. Here we present evidence in favor of the hypothesis…
We revisit the gravitational lensing phenomenon using a new visualization technique. It consists in projecting the observers sky into the source plane, what gives rise to a folded and stretched surface. This provides a clear graphical tool…
The effectiveness of projection methods for solving systems of linear inequalities is investigated. It is shown that they have a computational advantage over some alternatives and that this makes them successful in real-world applications.…
Geometrical optical illusions have been object of many studies due to the possibility they offer to understand the behaviour of low-level visual processing. They consist in situations in which the perceived geometrical properties of an…
We perform a situational diagnosis in topics of astronomy of pre-service elementary teachers in order to try and develop didactic tools that better collaborate with their formal education. In this work we present the instrument we designed…
In the field theories in physics, any particular region of the presumed space-time continuum and all interactions between elementary objects therein can be objectively measured and/or accounted for mathematically. Since this does not apply…
Cosmologically motivated theories that explain small acceleration rate of the Universe via modification of gravity at very large, horizon or super-horizon distances, can be tested by precision gravitational measurements at much shorter…
Hallucination is a persistent challenge in large language models (LLMs), where even with rigorous quality control, models often generate distorted facts. This paradox, in which error generation continues despite high-quality training data,…