Related papers: Towards a Theory of Pragmatic Information
"Standard" information theory says nothing about the semantic content of information. Nevertheless, applications such as evolutionary theory demand consideration of precisely this aspect of information, a need that has motivated a largely…
An objective definition of pragmatic information and the consideration of recent results about information processing in the human brain can help overcome some traditional difficulties with the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Rather…
This paper is part of an ongoing investigation of "pragmatic information", defined in Weinberger (2002) as "the amount of information actually used in making a decision". Because a study of information rates led to the Noiseless and Noisy…
The scientific community believes in the theory of evolution with a passion that rivals that of any religious belief. This passion extends beyond the irrefutable evidence of the fossil record to the familiar claims of survival of the…
A persuasion policy successfully persuades an agent to pick a particular action only if the information is designed in a manner that convinces the agent that it is in their best interest to pick that action. Thus, it is natural to ask, what…
We improve the informativeness of models for conditional text generation using techniques from computational pragmatics. These techniques formulate language production as a game between speakers and listeners, in which a speaker should…
Observations on the past provide some hints about what will happen in the future, and this can be quantified using information theory. The ``predictive information'' defined in this way has connections to measures of complexity that have…
I discuss the design of the method of entropic inference as a general framework for reasoning under conditions of uncertainty. The main contribution of this discussion is to emphasize the pragmatic elements in the derivation. More…
This work investigates a dynamic variant of Bayesian persuasion, in which a strategic sender seeks to influence a receiver's belief over time through controlling the timing of the information disclosure, under resource constraints. We…
We try to establish a unified information theoretic approach to learning and to explore some of its applications. First, we define {\em predictive information} as the mutual information between the past and the future of a time series,…
In financial markets valuable information is rarely circulated homogeneously, because of time required for information to spread. However, advances in communication technology means that the 'lifetime' of important information is typically…
Language is not only used to transmit neutral information; we often seek to persuade by arguing in favor of a particular view. Persuasion raises a number of challenges for classical accounts of belief updating, as information cannot be…
An agent acquires a costly flexible signal before making a decision. We explore to what degree knowledge of the agent's information costs helps predict her behavior. We establish an impossibility result: learning costs alone generate no…
We explore the application of a new theory of Semantic Information to the well-motivated problem of a resource foraging agent. Semantic information is defined as the subset of correlations, measured via the transfer entropy, between agent…
The concept of information has emerged as a language in its own right, bridging several disciplines that analyze natural phenomena and man-made systems. Integrated information has been introduced as a metric to quantify the amount of…
This paper studies a Stackelberg game wherein a sender (leader) attempts to shape the information of a less informed receiver (follower) who in turn takes an action that determines the payoff for both players. The sender chooses signals to…
This paper analyzes a dynamic interaction between a fully rational, privately informed sender and a boundedly rational, uninformed receiver with memory constraints. The sender controls the flow of information, while the receiver designs a…
Providing examples is one of the most common way for end-users to interact with program synthesizers. However, program synthesis systems assume that examples consistent with the program are chosen at random, and do not exploit the fact that…
Automated decision making is used routinely throughout our everyday life. Recommender systems decide which jobs, movies, or other user profiles might be interesting to us. Spell checkers help us to make good use of language. Fraud detection…
We show that strategies implemented in automatic theorem proving involve an interesting tradeoff between execution speed, proving speedup/computational time and usefulness of information. We advance formal definitions for these concepts by…