Related papers: Plasticity as the Mirror of Empowerment

This paper develops generalizations of empowerment to continuous states. Empowerment is a recently introduced information-theoretic quantity motivated by hypotheses about the efficiency of the sensorimotor loop in biological organisms, but…

Plasticity is a fundamental property of complex systems, such as the brain or an organism. Yet it typically remains a descriptive concept inferred retrospectively from observed outcomes, such as modifications in activity or morphology.…

This book chapter is an introduction to and an overview of the information-theoretic, task independent utility function "Empowerment", which is defined as the channel capacity between an agent's actions and an agent's sensors. It quantifies…

The pursuit of general intelligence has traditionally centered on external objectives: an agent's control over its environments or mastery of specific tasks. This external focus, however, can produce specialized agents that lack…

In a strategy-proof mechanism, the influence of an agent may be measured as the set of outcomes an agent can bring about by varying her (reported) type. More specifically, we refer to an agent's influence on her own relevant outcomes as her…

One aspect of intelligence is the ability to restructure your own environment so that the world you live in becomes more beneficial to you. In this paper we investigate how the information-theoretic measure of agent empowerment can provide…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly emerging as a new paradigm of scientific discovery, namely data-driven science, across nearly all scientific disciplines. In materials science and engineering, AI has already begun to exert a…

We study agency under partial observability in deterministic physical or simulated worlds, where apparent randomness arises from uncertainty over initial conditions, fixed law bits, and unrolled exogenous noise. We model sensing and…

I discuss three aspects of the notion of agency from the standpoint of physics: (i) what makes a physical system an agent; (ii) the reason for agency's time orientation; (iii) the source of the information generated in choosing an action. I…

The concept of power can be explored at several scales: from physical action and process effectuation, all the way to complex social dynamics. A spectrum-wide analysis of power requires attention to the fundamental principles that constrain…

Autonomous agents powered by Large Language Models are transforming AI, creating an imperative for the visualization field to embrace agentic frameworks. However, our field's focus on a human in the sensemaking loop raises critical…

Agency is a system's capacity to steer outcomes toward a goal, and is a central topic of study across biology, philosophy, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Determining if a system exhibits agency is a notoriously difficult…

Humans and animals explore their environment and acquire useful skills even in the absence of clear goals, exhibiting intrinsic motivation. The study of intrinsic motivation in artificial agents is concerned with the following question:…

We propose a framework for measuring attentional agency, which we define as a user's ability to allocate attention according to their own desires, goals, and intentions on digital platforms that use statistical learning to prioritize…

With the arrival of digital maps, the ubiquity of maps has increased sharply and new map functionalities have become available such as changing the scale on the fly or displaying/hiding layers. Users can now interact with maps on multiple…

In social robot navigation, traditional metrics like proxemics and behavior naturalness emphasize human comfort and adherence to social norms but often fail to capture an agent's autonomy and adaptability in dynamic environments. This paper…

Information power is the capacity to convert data flows into durable shifts in attention, belief, and behavior. We argue that this power has migrated from broadcast persuasion to platform-ized, data-driven operations that fuse computational…

We introduce a methodology for efficiently computing a lower bound to empowerment, allowing it to be used as an unsupervised cost function for policy learning in real-time control. Empowerment, being the channel capacity between actions and…

It is known that individual opinions on different policy issues often align to a dominant ideological dimension (e.g. "left" vs. "right") and become increasingly polarized. We provide an agent-based model that reproduces these two stylized…

The model is based on a vector representation of each agent. The components of the vector are the key continuous attributes that determine the social behavior of the agent. A simple mathematical force vector model is used to predict the…