Related papers: Collective learning from individual experiences an…

Collective animal movement fascinates children and scientists alike. One of the most commonly given explanations for collective animal movement is improved foraging. Animals are hypothesized to gain from searching for food in groups. Here,…

Collective sensing is an emergent phenomenon which enables individuals to estimate a hidden property of the environment through the observation of social interactions. Previous work on collective sensing shows that gregarious individuals…

Thanks to recent technological advances, it is now possible to track with an unprecedented precision and for long periods of time the movement patterns of many living organisms in their habitat. The increasing amount of data available on…

The spontaneous organization of collective activities in animal groups and societies has attracted a considerable amount of attention over the last decade. This kind of coordination often permits group-living species to achieve collective…

Collective behavior, and swarm formation in particular, has been studied from several perspectives within a large variety of fields, ranging from biology to physics. In this work, we apply Projective Simulation to model each individual as…

A standard belief on emerging collective behavior is that it emerges from simple individual rules. Most of the mathematical research on such collective behavior starts from imperative individual rules, like always go to the center. But how…

Popular hypotheses about the origins of collective adaptation are related to two basic behaviours: protection from predators and a combined search for food resources. Among the anti-predator explanations, the predator confusion hypothesis…

Combining the predictions of collections of neural networks often outperforms the best single network. Such ensembles are typically trained independently, and their superior `wisdom of the crowd' originates from the differences between…

Animal groups collaborate with one another throughout their lives to better comprehend their surroundings. Here, we try to model, using continuous random walks, how the entire process of birth, reproduction, and death might impact the…

Previous human foraging experiments have shown that human groups routinely undermatch environmental resources much like other animal species. In this experiment, we test whether humans also selectively rely on others as information sources…

Foraging is a widespread behavior, and being part of a group may bring several benefits compared to solitary foraging, such as collective pooling of information and reducing environmental uncertainty. Often theoretical models of collective…

How do social animals make effective decisions in the absence of a leader? While coordination can improve accuracy, it also introduces delays as information propagates through the group. In changing environments, these delays can outweigh…

Animals form groups for many reasons but there are costs and benefit associated with group formation. One of the benefits is collective memory. In groups on the move, social interactions play a crucial role in the cohesion and the ability…

The ability of biological and artificial collectives to outperform solitary individuals in a wide variety of tasks depends crucially on the efficient processing of social and environmental information at the level of the collective. Here,…

Intelligent agents collect and process information from their dynamically evolving neighbourhood to efficiently navigate through it. However, agent-level intelligence does not guarantee that at the level of a collective; a common example is…

Theoretical models of populations and swarms typically start with the assumption that the motion of agents is governed by the local stimuli. However, an intelligent agent, with some understanding of the laws that govern its habitat, can…

We compare how well agents aggregate information in two repeated social learning environments. In the first setting agents have access to a public data set. In the second they have access to the same data, and also to the past actions of…

Collective foragers, from animals to robotic swarms, must balance exploration and exploitation to locate sparse resources efficiently. While social learning is known to facilitate this balance, how the range of information sharing shapes…

The formation of groups of interacting individuals improves performance and fitness in many decentralised systems, from micro-organisms to social insects, from robotic swarms to artificial intelligence algorithms. Often, group formation and…

Flocks of birds, schools of fish, insects swarms are examples of coordinated motion of a group that arises spontaneously from the action of many individuals. Here, we study flocking behavior from the viewpoint of multi-agent reinforcement…