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Active inference helps us simulate adaptive behavior and decision-making in biological and artificial agents. Building on our previous work exploring the relationship between active inference, well-being, resilience, and sustainability, we…
Adult neurogenesis has long been documented in the vertebrate brain, and recently even in humans. Although it has been conjectured for many years that its functional role is related to the renewing of memories, no clear mechanism as to how…
The dynamics of populations is rich, taking into account that both, the individual's actions and the population's fitness are coupled. The way in which an individual chooses a strategy depends off course on the interaction with other…
Evolution in time-varying environments naturally leads to adaptable biological systems that can easily switch functionalities. Advances in the synthesis of environmentally-responsive materials therefore open up the possibility of creating a…
Traditional approaches to the design of multi-agent navigation algorithms consider the environment as a fixed constraint, despite the obvious influence of spatial constraints on agents' performance. Yet hand-designing improved environment…
We are living in an uncertain and dynamically changing world, where optimal decision-making under uncertainty is directly linked to the survival of species. However, evolutionary selection pressures that shape value-based decision-making…
In the ecological approach to perception and action, information that specifies affordances is available in the energy arrays surrounding organisms, and this information is detected by organisms in order to perceptually guide their actions.…
Combining a spatiotemporal, multi-agent based model of a foraging ecosystem with linear, genetically programmed rules for the agents' behaviors results in implicit, endogenous, objective functions and selection algorithms based on "natural…
The rates at which individuals memorize and forget environmental information strongly influence their movement paths and long-term space use. To understand how these cognitive time scales shape population-level patterns, we propose and…
A large body of research in continual learning is devoted to overcoming the catastrophic forgetting of neural networks by designing new algorithms that are robust to the distribution shifts. However, the majority of these works are strictly…
Existing Continual Learning (CL) approaches have focused on addressing catastrophic forgetting by leveraging regularization methods, replay buffers, and task-specific components. However, realistic CL solutions must be shaped not only by…
In model-based learning, an agent's model is commonly defined over transitions between consecutive states of an environment even though planning often requires reasoning over multi-step timescales, with intermediate states either…
Online learning via Bayes' theorem allows new data to be continuously integrated into an agent's current beliefs. However, a naive application of Bayesian methods in non stationary environments leads to slow adaptation and results in state…
We conducted an investigation of the effect that extreme variability of the individual's environment has in the individual's adaptability and, in general, in the co-evolution of a population. First we assume that the individuals are a kind…
Cultures around the world show varying levels of conservatism. While maintaining traditional ideas prevents wrong ones from being embraced, it also slows or prevents adaptation to new times. Without exploration there can be no improvement,…
Fast and accurate structural dynamics analysis is important for structural design and damage assessment. Structural dynamics analysis leveraging machine learning techniques has become a popular research focus in recent years. Although the…
Continuous adaptation to variable environments is crucial for the survival of living organisms. Here, we analyze how adaptation, forecasting, and resource mobilization towards a target state, termed actionability, interact to determine…
The adaptive fitness of an organism in its ecological niche is highly reliant upon its ability to associate an environmental or internal stimulus with a behavior response through reinforcement. This simple but powerful observation has been…
Populations evolving in fluctuating environments face the fundamental challenge of balancing adaptation to current conditions against preparation for uncertain futures. Here, we study microbial evolution in partially predictable…
The discovery that memory of particle configurations and plastic events can be stored in amorphous solids subject to oscillatory shear has spurred research into methods for storing and retrieving information from these materials. However,…