Related papers: Failures of Contingent Thinking
It has been suggested, on the one hand, that quantum states are just states of knowledge; and, on the other, that quantum theory is merely a theory of correlations. These suggestions are confronted with problems about the nature of…
This study explores the emergence of counter-inferential behavior in natural and artificial cognitive systems, that is, patterns in which agents misattribute empirical success or suppress adaptation, leading to epistemic rigidity or…
We present an opinion model founded upon the principles of the bounded confidence interaction among agents. Our objective is to explain the polarization effects inherent to vector-valued opinions. The evolutionary process adheres to the…
Recursive reasoning systems alternate between acquiring new evidence and refining an accumulated understanding. Two design choices are typically left implicit: how to represent the evolving reasoning state, and when to stop iterating. This…
Modern AI agents increasingly combine conversational interaction with autonomous task execution, such as coding and web research, raising a natural question: What happens when an agent engaged in long-horizon tasks is exposed to user…
Although perception is an increasingly dominant portion of the overall computational cost for autonomous systems, only a fraction of the information perceived is likely to be relevant to the current task. To alleviate these perception…
Representations are internal models of the environment that can provide guidance to a behaving agent, even in the absence of sensory information. It is not clear how representations are developed and whether or not they are necessary or…
The study of opinions $-$ e.g., their formation and change, and their effects on our society $-$ by means of theoretical and numerical models has been one of the main goals of sociophysics until now, but it is one of the defining topics…
This paper studies how uncertainty about problem difficulty shapes problem-solving strategies. I develop a dynamic model where an agent solves a problem by brainstorming approaches of unknown quality and allocating a fixed effort budget…
Storing knowledge of an agent's environment in the form of a probabilistic generative model has been established as a crucial ingredient in a multitude of cognitive tasks. Perception has been formalised as probabilistic inference over the…
Agentic AI seeks to endow systems with sustained autonomy, reasoning, and interaction capabilities. To realize this vision, its assumptions about agency must be complemented by explicit models of cognition, cooperation, and governance. This…
Collective phenomena in systems of interacting agents have helped us understand diverse social, ecological and biological observations. The corresponding explanations are challenged by incorrect information processing. In particular, the…
When users stand to gain from certain predictions, they are prone to act strategically to obtain favorable predictive outcomes. Whereas most works on strategic classification consider user actions that manifest as feature modifications, we…
Persistent memory is turning language-model-based agents from stateless participants in isolated interactions into state-bearing components of LLM-based multi-agent systems. As memory becomes durable, reloadable, and behavior-shaping across…
An explanation for the political processes leading to the sudden collapse of empires and states would be useful for understanding both historical and contemporary political events. We seek a general description of state collapse spanning…
In this paper, we consider one aspect of the problem of applying decision theory to the design of agents that learn how to make decisions under uncertainty. This aspect concerns how an agent can estimate probabilities for the possible…
Decisions in organizations are about evaluating alternatives and choosing the one that would best serve organizational goals. To the extent that the evaluation of alternatives could be formulated as a predictive task with appropriate…
Complexity of the problem of choosing among uncertain acts is a salient feature of many of the environments in which departures from expected utility theory are observed. I propose and axiomatize a model of choice under uncertainty in which…
In this work, we analyze the circumstances under which social influence operations are likely to succeed. These circumstances include the selection of Confederate agents to execute intentional perturbations and the selection of Perturbation…
According to Dennett, the same system may be described using a `physical' (mechanical) explanatory stance, or using an `intentional' (belief- and goal-based) explanatory stance. Humans tend to find the physical stance more helpful for…