Related papers: A World unto Itself: Human Communication as Active…

Human intelligence's adaptability is remarkable, allowing us to adjust to new tasks and multi-modal environments swiftly. This skill is evident from a young age as we acquire new abilities and solve problems by imitating others or following…

This paper presents a computational model of how conversational participants collaborate in order to make a referring action successful. The model is based on the view of language as goal-directed behavior. We propose that the content of a…

Autonomous driving in complex traffic requires reasoning under uncertainty. Common approaches rely on prediction-based planning or risk-aware control, but these are typically treated in isolation, limiting their ability to capture the…

Social learning -by observing and copying others- is a highly successful cultural mechanism for adaptation, outperforming individual information acquisition and experience. Here, we investigate social learning in the context of the uniquely…

A robot operating in isolation needs to reason over the uncertainty in its model of the world and adapt its own actions to account for this uncertainty. Similarly, a robot interacting with people needs to reason over its uncertainty over…

The relationship between the "knowledge base" and the "globalization" of communication systems is discussed from the perspective of communication theory. I argue that inter-human communication takes place at two levels. At the first level…

Adaptive behavior is mainly the result of adaptive brains. We go a step beyond and claim that the brain does not only adapt to its surrounding reality but rather, it builds itself up to constructs its own reality. That is, rather than just…

The ability to anticipate others' goals and intentions is at the basis of human-human social interaction. Such ability, largely based on non-verbal communication, is also a key to having natural and pleasant interactions with artificial…

Direct reciprocity is a mechanism for the evolution of cooperation in repeated social interactions. According to this literature, individuals naturally learn to adopt conditionally cooperative strategies if they have multiple encounters…

Active inference is a unifying theory for perception and action resting upon the idea that the brain maintains an internal model of the world by minimizing free energy. From a behavioral perspective, active inference agents can be seen as…

Do language models make decisions under uncertainty like humans do, and what role does chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning play in the underlying decision process? We introduce an active probabilistic reasoning task that cleanly separates…

Large parts of professional human communication proceed in a request-reply fashion, whereby requests contain specifics of the information desired while replies can deliver the required information. However, time limitations often force…

While we do not always use words, communicating what we want to an AI is a conversation -- with ourselves as well as with it, a recurring loop with optional steps depending on the complexity of the situation and our request. Any given…

Because human cognition is creative and socially situated, knowledge accumulates, diffuses, and gets applied in new contexts, generating cultural analogs of phenomena observed in population genetics such as adaptation and drift. It is…

Many real-world tasks require agents to coordinate their behavior to achieve shared goals. Successful collaboration requires not only adopting the same communicative conventions, but also grounding these conventions in the same…

Humans have the ability to report the contents of their subjective experience - we can say to each other, "I am aware of X". The decision processes that support these reports about mental contents remain poorly understood. In this article I…

Interactive communication (IC), i.e., the reciprocal exchange of information between two or more interactive partners, is a fundamental part of human nature. As such, it has been studied across multiple scientific disciplines with different…

Social dilemmas are situations in which collective interests are at odds with private interests: pollution, depletion of natural resources, and intergroup conflicts, are at their core social dilemmas. Because of their multidisciplinarity…

AI chatbots are increasingly stepping into roles as collaborators or teachers in analyzing, visualizing, and reasoning through data and domain problem. Yet, AI's default assistant mode with its comprehensive and one-off responses may…

Recent findings in neuroscience suggest that the human brain represents information in a geometric structure (for instance, through conceptual spaces). In order to communicate, we flatten the complex representation of entities and their…