Related papers: Affordance switching in self-organizing brain-body…
The perceptual experience of architecture is enacted by the sensory and motor system. When we act, we change the perceived environment according to a set of expectations that depend on our body and the built environment. The continuous…
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…
Unlike many physical nonequilibrium systems, in biological systems, the coupling to external energy sources is not a fixed parameter but adaptively controlled by the system itself. We do not have theoretical frameworks that allow for such…
Embodied agents operating in human spaces must be able to master how their environment works: what objects can the agent use, and how can it use them? We introduce a reinforcement learning approach for exploration for interaction, whereby…
Mobile robot platforms will increasingly be tasked with activities that involve grasping and manipulating objects in open world environments. Affordance understanding provides a robot with means to realise its goals and execute its tasks,…
Ecosystems, which are intricate amalgams of biological communities and their surrounding environments, continually evolve under the influence of their myriad interactions. The world is currently facing intensifying environmental…
Biological organisms are open, adaptve systems that can respond to changes in environment in specific ways. Adaptation and response can be posed as an optimization problem, with a tradeoff between the benefit obtained from a response and…
Self-organized criticality elucidates the conditions under which physical and biological systems tune themselves to the edge of a second-order phase transition, with scale invariance. Motivated by the empirical observation of bimodal…
The increasing volume of ecologically and biologically relevant data has revealed a wide collection of emergent patterns in living systems. Analyzing different datasets, ranging from metabolic gene-regulatory to species interaction…
Visualization design influences how people perceive data patterns, yet most research focuses on low-level analytic tasks, such as finding correlations. The extent to which these perceptual affordances translate to high-level decision-making…
Decision-making AI agents are often faced with two important challenges: the depth of the planning horizon, and the branching factor due to having many choices. Hierarchical reinforcement learning methods aim to solve the first problem, by…
Taking inspiration from how the brain coordinates multiple learning systems is an appealing strategy to endow robots with more flexibility. One of the expected advantages would be for robots to autonomously switch to the least costly system…
Empirical evidence suggesting that living systems might operate in the vicinity of critical points, at the borderline between order and disorder, has proliferated in recent years, with examples ranging from spontaneous brain activity to…
Living systems operate far from equilibrium, yet few general frameworks provide global bounds on biological transients. In high-dimensional biological networks like ecosystems, long transients arise from the separate timescales of…
The onset of life is often framed around membrane bound compartments and encoded metabolism, leaving unresolved how spatial organization arose before stable boundaries. In this context, environmental gradients are usually treated as…
Current theories suggest that adaptive decision-making necessitates the interaction between multiple decision-making systems. The computational definitions of different models of decision-making suggest interactions with task demands and…
How do organisms recognize their environment by acquiring knowledge about the world, and what actions do they take based on this knowledge? This article examines hypotheses about organisms' adaptation to the environment from machine…
Perceiving and manipulating 3D articulated objects in diverse environments is essential for home-assistant robots. Recent studies have shown that point-level affordance provides actionable priors for downstream manipulation tasks. However,…
Finding general principles underlying brain function has been appealing to scientists. Indeed, in some branches of science like physics and chemistry (and to some degree biology) a general theory often can capture the essence of a wide…
The relationship between physiological systems and modern electromechanical technologies is fast becoming intimate with high degrees of complex interaction. It can be argued that muscular function, limb movements, and touch perception serve…