Related papers: Trade-off between sensitivity and selectivity in o…
As few real systems comprise indistinguishable units, diversity is a hallmark of nature. Diversity among interacting units shapes properties of collective behavior such as synchronization and information transmission. However, the benefits…
Despite the success of neural networks, the issue of classification robustness remains, particularly highlighted by adversarial examples. In this paper, we address this challenge by focusing on the continuum of functions implemented in…
Recent efforts to learn reward functions from human feedback have tended to use deep neural networks, whose lack of transparency hampers our ability to explain agent behaviour or verify alignment. We explore the merits of learning…
How cells reliably infer information about their environment is a fundamentally important question. While sensing and signaling generally start with cell-surface receptors, the degree of accuracy with which a cell can measure external…
Most decisions require information gathering from a stimulus presented with different gaps. Indeed, the brain process of this integration is rarely ambiguous. Recently, it has been claimed that humans can optimally integrate the information…
Current natural language processing (NLP) research tends to focus on only one or, less frequently, two dimensions - e.g., performance, privacy, fairness, or efficiency - at a time, which may lead to suboptimal conclusions and often…
The performance of attractor neural networks has been shown to depend crucially on the heterogeneity of the underlying topology. We take this analysis a step further by examining the effect of degree-degree correlations -- or assortativity…
The bias/variance tradeoff is fundamental to learning: increasing a model's complexity can improve its fit on training data, but potentially worsens performance on future samples. Remarkably, however, the human brain effortlessly handles a…
While reinforcement learning has made great improvements, state-of-the-art algorithms can still struggle with seemingly simple set-point feedback control problems. One reason for this is that the learned controller may not be able to excite…
Associative learning allows animals to rapidly adapt to changes in the environment. Whether and what aspects of such acquired traits may be transmittable across generations remains unclear. Using prolonged olfactory training and subsequent…
The development of trustworthy conversational information-seeking systems relies on dialogue models that can generate faithful and accurate responses based on relevant knowledge texts. However, two main challenges hinder this task. Firstly,…
The mammalian brain is a metabolically expensive device, and evolutionary pressures have presumably driven it to make productive use of its resources. For sensory areas, this concept has been expressed more formally as an optimality…
Many biological systems can sense periodical variations in a stimulus input and produce well-timed, anticipatory responses after the input is removed. Such systems show memory effects for retaining timing information in the stimulus and…
Objects are represented in sensory systems by continuous manifolds due to sensitivity of neuronal responses to changes in physical features such as location, orientation, and intensity. What makes certain sensory representations better…
When evaluating the lengthy inclusion-exclusion expansion many of its terms may turn out to be zero, and hence should be discarded beforehand. Often this can be done. The main idea is that the index sets of nonzero terms constitute a set…
A popular theory of perceptual processing holds that the brain learns both a generative model of the world and a paired recognition model using variational Bayesian inference. Most hypotheses of how the brain might learn these models assume…
In the olfactory system, odor percepts retain their identity despite substantial variations in concentration, timing, and background. We propose a novel strategy for encoding intensity-invariant stimuli identity that is based on…
Orientation selectivity is a remarkable feature of the neurons located in the primary visual cortex. Provided that the visual neurons acquire orientation selectivity through activity-dependent Hebbian learning, the development process could…
In this work we focus on how noise propagates in biochemical reaction networks and affects sensitivities of the system. We discover that the stochastic fluctuations can enhance sensitivities in one region of the value of control parameters…
Statistical properties of environments experienced by biological signaling systems in the real world change, which necessitate adaptive responses to achieve high fidelity information transmission. One form of such adaptive response is gain…