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Understanding and modeling human driver behavior is crucial for advanced vehicle development. However, unique driving styles, inconsistent behavior, and complex decision processes render it a challenging task, and existing approaches often…
Surprise-based learning allows agents to rapidly adapt to non-stationary stochastic environments characterized by sudden changes. We show that exact Bayesian inference in a hierarchical model gives rise to a surprise-modulated trade-off…
Habituation - a phenomenon in which a dynamical system exhibits a diminishing response to repeated stimulations that eventually recovers when the stimulus is withheld - is universally observed in living systems from animals to unicellular…
Predicting where a person is looking is a complex task, requiring to understand not only the person's gaze and scene content, but also the 3D scene structure and the person's situation (are they manipulating? interacting or observing…
The ability to recognize human partners is an important social skill to build personalized and long-term human-robot interactions, especially in scenarios like education, care-giving, and rehabilitation. Faces and voices constitute two…
Prompt learning has emerged as an efficient alternative for fine-tuning foundational models, such as CLIP, for various downstream tasks. However, there is no work that provides a comprehensive explanation for the working mechanism of the…
In humans, intrinsic motivation is an important mechanism for open-ended cognitive development; in robots, it has been shown to be valuable for exploration. An important aspect of human cognitive development is $\textit{episodic memory}$…
The recent phenomenal success of language models has reinvigorated machine learning research, and large sequence models such as transformers are being applied to a variety of domains. One important problem class that has remained relatively…
Despite its omnipresence in robotics application, the nature of spatial knowledge and the mechanisms that underlie its emergence in autonomous agents are still poorly understood. Recent theoretical work suggests that the concept of space…
This work presents an architecture that generates curiosity-driven goal-directed exploration behaviours for an image sensor of a microfarming robot. A combination of deep neural networks for offline unsupervised learning of low-dimensional…
Mental simulation is a critical cognitive function for goal-directed behavior because it is essential for assessing actions and their consequences. When a self-generated or externally specified goal is given, a sequence of actions that is…
Causal structure learning is a key problem in many domains. Causal structures can be learnt by performing experiments on the system of interest. We address the largely unexplored problem of designing a batch of experiments that each…
Trained human pilots or operators still stand out through their efficient, robust, and versatile skills in guidance tasks such as driving agile vehicles in spatial environments or performing complex surgeries. This research studies how…
Machine learning algorithms have achieved superhuman performance in specific complex domains. However, learning online from few examples and compositional learning for efficient generalization across domains remain elusive. In humans, such…
Sensorimotor contingency theory offers a promising account of the nature of perception, a topic rarely addressed in the robotics community. We propose a developmental framework to address the problem of the autonomous acquisition of…
Self-organization of complex morphological patterns from local interactions is a fascinating phenomenon in many natural and artificial systems. In the artificial world, typical examples of such morphogenetic systems are cellular automata.…
Human learning is a complex phenomenon requiring flexibility to adapt existing brain function and precision in selecting new neurophysiological activities to drive desired behavior. These two attributes -- flexibility and selection -- must…
Living systems process sensory data to facilitate adaptive behaviour. A given sensor can be stimulated as the result of internally driven activity, or by purely external (environmental) sources. It is clear that these inputs are processed…
Knowledge from animals and humans inspires robotic innovations. Numerous efforts have been made to achieve agile locomotion in quadrupedal robots through classical controllers or reinforcement learning approaches. These methods usually rely…
Findings in recent years on the sensitivity of convolutional neural networks to additive noise, light conditions and to the wholeness of the training dataset, indicate that this technology still lacks the robustness needed for the…