Related papers: Affordance switching in self-organizing brain-body…
Active systems across scales, ranging from molecular machines to human crowds, are usually modeled as assemblies of self-propelled particles driven by internally generated forces. However, these models often assume memoryless dynamics and…
As a result of a hundred million years of evolution, living animals have adapted extremely well to their ecological niche. Such adaptation implies species-specific interactions with their immediate environment by processing sensory cues and…
The free energy principle (FEP) is a mathematical framework that describes how biological systems self-organize and survive in their environment. This principle provides insights on multiple scales, from high-level behavioral and cognitive…
A dynamical system approaching the first-order transition can exhibit a specific type of critical behavior known as self-organized bistability (SOB). It lies in the fact that the system can permanently switch between the coexisting states…
A celebrated and controversial hypothesis conjectures that some biological systems --parts, aspects, or groups of them-- may extract important functional benefits from operating at the edge of instability, halfway between order and…
Human perceptual and cognitive abilities are limited resources. Today, in the age of cheap information --cheap to produce, to manipulate, to disseminate--, this cognitive bottleneck translates into hypercompetition for visibility among…
Robotics has been a popular field of research in the past few decades, with much success in industrial applications such as manufacturing and logistics. This success is led by clearly defined use cases and controlled operating environments.…
Robotic affordances, providing information about what actions can be taken in a given situation, can aid robotic manipulation. However, learning about affordances requires expensive large annotated datasets of interactions or…
Robotic affordances, providing information about what actions can be taken in a given situation, can aid robotic manipulation. However, learning about affordances requires expensive large annotated datasets of interactions or…
Cognitive flexibility describes the human ability to switch between modes of mental function to achieve goals. Mental switching is accompanied by transient changes in brain activity, which must occur atop an anatomical architecture that…
Can a video generation model be repurposed as an interactive world simulator? We explore the affordance perception potential of text-to-video models by teaching them to predict human-environment interaction. Given a scene image and a prompt…
The Free-Energy Principle (FEP) [1-3] has been adopted in a variety of ambitious proposals that aim to characterize all adaptive, sentient, and cognitive systems within a unifying framework. Judging by the amount of attention it has…
We consider a model of nomadic agents exploring and competing for time-varying location-specific resources, arising in crowdsourced transportation services, online communities, and in traditional location based economic activity. This model…
Variants of the Kohonen model are proposed to study biological principles of self-organization in a model of young brain. We suggest a function to measure aquired knowledge and use it to auto-adapt the topology of neuronal connectivity,…
A growing field in robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) research is human-robot collaboration, whose target is to enable effective teamwork between humans and robots. However, in many situations human teams are still superior to…
Learning with physical systems is an emerging paradigm that seeks to harness the intrinsic nonlinear dynamics of physical substrates for learning. The impetus for a paradigm shift in how hardware is used for computational intelligence stems…
We present a simple discrete model for the non-linear spatial interaction of different kinds of ``subpopulations'' composed of identical moving entities like particles, bacteria, individuals, etc. The model allows to mimic a variety of…
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…
The brain in conjunction with the body is able to adapt to new environments and perform multiple behaviors through reuse of neural resources and transfer of existing behavioral traits. Although mechanisms that underlie this ability are not…
What determines biodiversity in nature is a prominent issue in ecology, especially in biotic resource systems that are typically devoid of cross-feeding. Here, we show that by incorporating pairwise encounters among consumer individuals…