Related papers: Trade-off between sensitivity and selectivity in o…
We investigate cortical learning from the perspective of mechanism design. First, we show that discretizing standard models of neurons and synaptic plasticity leads to rational agents maximizing simple scoring rules. Second, our main result…
Mirror neurons are a class of neurons that activate both when an individual observes an action and when they perform the same action. This mechanism reveals a fundamental interplay between action understanding and embodied execution,…
In this paper, we confront the problem of applying reinforcement learning to agents that perceive the environment through many sensors and that can perform parallel actions using many actuators as is the case in complex autonomous robots.…
Existing approaches to combine both additive and multiplicative neural units either use a fixed assignment of operations or require discrete optimization to determine what function a neuron should perform. However, this leads to an…
We consider a cognitive radio system, in which the secondary users (SUs) and primary users (PUs) coexist. The SUs are equipped with steerable directional antennas. In our system, the secondary transmitter (SUtx) first senses the spectrum…
We study how a decision-maker can acquire more information from an agent by reducing her own ability to observe what the agent transmits. In a large class of binary-action games, opacity design is just as good as full commitment to actions…
When our eyes are presented with the same image, the brain processes it to view it as a single coherent one. The lateral shift in the position of our eyes, causes the two images to possess certain differences, which our brain exploits for…
When selective attention is devoted to one of multiple stimuli within receptive fields of neurons in visual area V4, cells respond as if only the attended stimulus was present. The underlying neural mechanisms are still debated, but…
Systems composed of distinct complex networks are present in many real-world environments, from society to ecological systems. In the present paper, we propose a network model obtained as a consequence of interactions between two species…
Various biological sensory systems exhibit a response to a relative change of the stimulus, often referred to as fold-change detection. In the last few years fold-change detecting mechanisms, based on transcriptional networks, have been…
Imitation is a key component of human social behavior, and is widely used by both children and adults as a way to navigate uncertain or unfamiliar situations. But in an environment populated by multiple heterogeneous agents pursuing…
This paper addresses two main challenges facing systems neuroscience today: understanding the nature and function of a) cortical feedback between sensory areas and b) correlated variability. Starting from the old idea of perception as…
Multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL) allows a user to express preference over outcomes in terms of the relative importance of the objectives, but standard metrics cannot capture whether changes in preference reliably change the…
A common view of sensory processing is as probabilistic inference of latent causes from receptor activations. Standard approaches often assume these causes are a priori independent, yet real-world generative factors are typically…
In this paper, we enhance the traditional confusion network system combination approach with an additional model trained by a neural network. This work is motivated by the fact that the commonly used binary system voting models only assign…
In repeated interactions between individuals, we do not expect that exactly the same situation will occur from one time to another. Contrary to what is common in models of repeated games in the literature, most real situations may differ a…
People often interact repeatedly: with relatives, through file sharing, in politics, etc. Many such interactions are reciprocal: reacting to the actions of the other. In order to facilitate decisions regarding reciprocal interactions, we…
In this note, we present a hypothesis for the emergence of the phenomenon of sleep in organisms with sufficiently developed central nervous systems. We argue that sleep emerges because individual neurons must periodically enter a resting…
Graphical models have gained a lot of attention recently as a tool for learning and representing dependencies among variables in multivariate data. Often, domain scientists are looking specifically for differences among the dependency…
In various biological systems information from many noisy molecular receptors must be integrated into a collective response. A striking example is the thermal imaging organ of pit vipers. Single nerve fibers in the organ reliably respond to…