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When navigating complex environments, animals often combine multiple strategies to mitigate the effects of external disturbances. These modalities often correspond to different sources of information, leading to speed-accuracy trade-offs.…
This paper deals with the problem of circle packing, in which the largest radii circle is to be fit in a confined space filled with arbitrary circles of different radii and centers. A circle packing problem is one of a variety of cutting…
Almost all neural computations involve making predictions. Whether an organism is trying to catch prey, avoid predators, or simply move through a complex environment, the data it collects through its senses can guide its actions only to the…
The nervous system solves a wide variety of problems in signal processing. In many cases the performance of the nervous system is so good that it apporaches fundamental physical limits, such as the limits imposed by diffraction and photon…
Nature is in constant flux, so animals must account for changes in their environment when making decisions. How animals learn the timescale of such changes and adapt their decision strategies accordingly is not well understood. Recent…
Many problems in machine learning involve calculating correspondences between sets of objects, such as point clouds or images. Discrete optimal transport provides a natural and successful approach to such tasks whenever the two sets of…
Animals use a combination of egocentric navigation driven by the internal integration of environmental cues, interspersed with geocentric course correction and reorientation, often with uncertainty in sensory acquisition of information,…
The mammalian brain is a metabolically expensive device, and evolutionary pressures have presumably driven it to make productive use of its resources. For sensory areas, this concept has been expressed more formally as an optimality…
Motivated by the applications, a class of optimal control problems is investigated, where the goal is to influence the behavior of a given population through another controlled one interacting with the first. Diffusive terms accounting for…
We propose a new model in order to study behaviors of self-organized system such as a group of animals. We assume that the individuals have two degrees of freedom corresponding one to their internal state and the other to their external…
Autonomous neural systems must efficiently process information in a wide range of novel environments, which may have very different statistical properties. We consider the problem of how to optimally distribute receptors along a…
Neural decoding may be formulated as dynamic state estimation (filtering) based on point process observations, a generally intractable problem. Numerical sampling techniques are often practically useful for the decoding of real neural data.…
A new field of research is rapidly expanding at the crossroad between statistical physics, information theory and combinatorial optimization. In particular, the use of cutting edge statistical physics concepts and methods allow one to solve…
Covering and packing problems can be modeled as games to encapsulate interesting social and engineering settings. These games have a high Price of Anarchy in their natural formulation. However, existing research applicable to specific…
Inspired by the swarming or flocking of animal systems we study groups of agents moving in unbounded 2D space. Individual trajectories derive from a ``bottom-up'' principle: individuals reorient to maximise their future path entropy over…
Many organisms, from flies to humans, use visual signals to estimate their motion through the world. To explore the motion estimation problem, we have constructed a camera/gyroscope system that allows us to sample, at high temporal…
Optimal control of large particle systems with collective dynamics by few agents is a subject of high practical importance (e.g. in evacuation dynamics), but still limited mathematical basis. In particular the transition from discrete…
In a constantly changing world, animals must account for environmental volatility when making decisions. To appropriately discount older, irrelevant information, they need to learn the rate at which the environment changes. We develop an…
The process of dynamic state estimation (filtering) based on point process observations is in general intractable. Numerical sampling techniques are often practically useful, but lead to limited conceptual insight about optimal…
Agents acting in the natural world aim at selecting appropriate actions based on noisy and partial sensory observations. Many behaviors leading to decision mak- ing and action selection in a closed loop setting are naturally phrased within…