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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,…
Complex systems show the capacity to aggregate information and to display coordinated activity. In the case of social systems the interaction of different individuals leads to the emergence of norms, trends in political positions, opinions,…
Fuelled by a desire for greater connectivity, networked systems now pervade our society at an unprecedented level that will affect it in ways we do not yet understand. In contrast, nature has already developed efficient networks that can…
Given the rapid proliferation of advanced information technologies, including the Internet, modern humans can easily access vast amount of socially transmitted information. Intuitively, this situation is isomorphic to some eusocial insects…
Social animals have to take into consideration the behaviour of conspecifics when making decisions to go by their daily lives. These decisions affect their fitness and there is therefore an evolutionary pressure to try making the right…
The level of autonomy is increasing in systems spanning multiple domains, but these systems still experience failures. One way to mitigate the risk of failures is to integrate human oversight of the autonomous systems and rely on the human…
In this paper, we study representation learning for multi-task decision-making in non-stationary environments. We consider the framework of sequential linear bandits, where the agent performs a series of tasks drawn from distinct sets…
Human learning is a complex phenomenon requiring flexibility to adapt existing brain function and precision in selecting new neurophysiological activities to drive desired behavior. These two attributes -- flexibility and selection -- must…
Insects identify and evaluate behaviorally relevant odorants in complex natural scenes where odor concentrations and mixture composition can change rapidly. In the honeybee, a combinatorial code of activated and inactivated projection…
Nature provides us with abundant examples of how large numbers of individuals can make decisions without the coordination of a central authority. Social insects, birds, fishes, and many other living collectives, rely on simple interaction…
We propose a nonlinear voter model to study the emergence of global consensus in opinion dynamics. In our model, agent $i$ agrees with one of binary opinions with the probability that is a power function of the number of agents holding this…
Animals learn to predict external contingencies from experience through a process of conditioning. A natural mechanism for conditioning is stimulus substitution, whereby the neuronal response to a stimulus with no prior behavioral…
Collective sensing is an emergent phenomenon which enables individuals to estimate a hidden property of the environment through the observation of social interactions. Previous work on collective sensing shows that gregarious individuals…
Non-binding communication is common in daily life and crucial for fostering cooperation, even though it has no direct payoff consequences. However, despite robust empirical evidence, its evolutionary basis remains poorly understood. Here,…
How does the brain optimize sensory information for decision-making in new tasks? One hypothesis suggests learning reduces redundancy in neural representations to improve efficiency, while another, based on Bayesian inference, predicts…
Collective motion is ubiquitous in nature; groups of animals, such as fish, birds, and ungulates appear to move as a whole, exhibiting a rich behavioral repertoire that ranges from directed movement to milling to disordered swarming.…
Presented with sensory challenges, living cells employ extensive noisy, fluctuating signalling and communication among themselves to compute a physiologically proper response which often results in symmetry breaking. We propose, based on…
A deep understanding of the dynamics of the human nervous system requires the simultaneous study of multiple spatiotemporal scales from the level of neurotransmitters up to the level of human cultures. This is likely impossible for…
Habituation - a phenomenon in which a dynamical system exhibits a diminishing response to repeated stimulations that eventually recovers when the stimulus is withheld - is universally observed in living systems from animals to unicellular…
Statistical whitening transformations play a fundamental role in many computational systems, and may also play an important role in biological sensory systems. Existing neural circuit models of adaptive whitening operate by modifying…