Related papers: Cell behavior in the face of uncertainty
Starting with Darwin, biologists have asked how populations evolve from a low fitness state that is evolutionarily stable to a high fitness state that is not. Specifically of interest is the emergence of cooperation and multicellularity…
Thanks to recent technological advances, it is now possible to track with an unprecedented precision and for long periods of time the movement patterns of many living organisms in their habitat. The increasing amount of data available on…
Many biological populations exhibit diversity in their strategy for survival and reproduction in a given environment, and microbes are an example. We explore the fate of different strategies under sustained environmental change by…
The rise in online social networking has brought about a revolution in social relations. However, its effects on offline interactions and its implications for collective well-being are still not clear and are under-investigated. We study…
The spontaneous behavioral changes of the agents during an epidemic can have significant effects on the delay and the prevalence of its spread. In this work, we study a social distancing game among the agents of a population, who determine…
From flocking birds to schooling fish, organisms interact to form collective dynamics across the natural world. Self-organization is present at smaller scales as well: cells interact and move during development to produce patterns in fish…
In numerous contexts, individuals may decide whether they take actions to mitigate the spread of disease, or not. Mitigating the spread of disease requires an individual to change their routine behaviours to benefit others, resulting in a…
Dynamical systems are frequently used to model biological systems. When these models are fit to data it is necessary to ascertain the uncertainty in the model fit. Here we present prediction deviation, a new metric of uncertainty that…
Across the tree of life, populations have evolved the capacity to contend with suboptimal conditions by engaging in dormancy, whereby individuals enter a reversible state of reduced metabolic activity. The resulting seed banks are complex,…
Ecological systems are dynamic and policies to manage them need to respond to that variation. However, policy adjustments will sometimes be costly, which means that fine-tuning a policy to track variability in the environment very tightly…
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…
Navigation up a sensory gradient is one of the simplest behaviours, and the simplest strategy is run and tumble. But some organisms use other strategies, such as reversing direction or turning by some angle. Here we ask what drives the…
In this paper I present several algorithmic techniques for improving the decision process of multiple types of agents behaving in environments where their interests are in conflict. The interactions between the agents are modelled by using…
We integrate dual-process theories of human cognition with evolutionary game theory to study the evolution of automatic and controlled decision-making processes. We introduce a model where agents who make decisions using either automatic or…
The development of new methods and representations for temporal decision-making requires a principled basis for characterizing and measuring the flexibility of decision strategies in the face of uncertainty. Our goal in this paper is to…
We examine how causal beliefs affect an agent's choices and how feedback on those choices leads to updated causal beliefs. Building on the structural-equations framework for modeling causality, we first examine the general problem of…
The physics of active biological matter, such as bacterial colonies and bird flocks, exhibiting interesting self-organizing dynamical behavior has gained considerable importance in recent years. Recent theoretical advances use techniques…
Biological organisms have evolved a wide range of immune mechanisms to defend themselves against pathogens. Beyond molecular details, these mechanisms differ in how protection is acquired, processed and passed on to subsequent generations…
The spatial segregation of species is fundamental to ecosystem formation and stability. Behavioural strategies may determine where species are located and how their interactions change the local environment arrangement. In response to…
The ability of biological and artificial collectives to outperform solitary individuals in a wide variety of tasks depends crucially on the efficient processing of social and environmental information at the level of the collective. Here,…