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The quest to comprehend the origins of intelligence raises intriguing questions about the evolution of learning abilities in natural systems. Why do living organisms possess an inherent drive to acquire knowledge of the unknown? Is this…
A model of an organism as an autonomous intelligent system has been proposed. This model was used to analyze learning of an organism in various environmental conditions. Processes of learning were divided into two types: strong and weak…
Living systems such as neuronal networks and animal groups process information about their environment via the dynamics of interacting units. These can transition between distinct macroscopic behaviors. Near such a transition (or critical…
Learning about many things can provide numerous benefits to a reinforcement learning system. For example, learning many auxiliary value functions, in addition to optimizing the environmental reward, appears to improve both exploration and…
Polymorphism in the peripheral sensory system (e.g., congenital individual differences in photopigment configuration) is important in diverse research fields, ranging from evolutionary biology to engineering, because of its potential…
Normal anxiety is considered an adaptive response to the possible presence of danger, but is susceptible to dysregulation. Anxiety disorders are prevalent at high frequency in contemporary human societies, yet impose substantial disability…
The tendency of repeating past choices more often than expected from the history of outcomes has been repeatedly empirically observed in reinforcement learning experiments. It can be explained by at least two computational processes:…
As automatic optimization techniques find their way into industrial applications, the behavior of many complex systems is determined by some form of planner picking the right actions to optimize a given objective function. In many cases,…
It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…
Human interlocutors tend to engage in adaptive behavior known as entrainment to become more similar to each other. Isolating the effect of consistency, i.e., speakers adhering to their individual styles, is a critical part of the analysis…
There is little doubt in scientific circles that--counting from the origin of life towards today--evolution has led to an increase in the amount of information stored within the genomes of the biosphere. This trend of increasing information…
The evolution of cognition is frequently discussed as the evolution of cognitive abilities or the evolution of some neuronal structures in the brain. However, since such traits or abilities are often highly complex, understanding their…
Can reproduction alone in the context of survival produce intelligence in our machines? In this work, self-replication is explored as a mechanism for the emergence of intelligent behavior in modern learning environments. By focusing purely…
Our experience of the world is multisensory, spanning a synthesis of language, sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Yet, artificial intelligence has primarily advanced in digital modalities like text, vision, and audio. This paper…
For many organisms, the number of sensory neurons is largely determined during development, before strong environmental cues are present. This is despite the fact that environments can fluctuate drastically both from generation to…
Survival analysis concerns the task of predicting the time until an event occurs. Often used in the medical field, survival analysis deals with incomplete (i.e., censored) data, for instance, from patients who did not experience the event…
Colour information not only helps sustain the survival of animal species by guiding sexual selection and foraging behaviour, but also is an important factor in the cultural and technological development of our own species. This is…
Biological intelligence is inherently adaptive -- animals continually adjust their actions based on environmental feedback. However, creating adaptive artificial intelligence (AI) remains a major challenge. The next frontier is to go beyond…
Reinforcement learning is a proven technique for an agent to learn a task. However, when learning a task using reinforcement learning, the agent cannot distinguish the characteristics of the environment from those of the task. This makes it…
Robustness, the insensitivity of some of a biological system's functionalities to a set of distinct conditions, is intimately linked to fitness. Recent studies suggest that it may also play a vital role in enabling the evolution of species.…