Related papers: Ambiguous signals and efficient codes

Biological systems, from a cell to the human brain, are inherently complex. A powerful representation of such systems, described by an intricate web of relationships across multiple scales, is provided by complex networks. Recently, several…

Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…

Central to the functioning of a living cell is its ability to control the readout or expression of information encoded in the genome. In many cases, a single transcription factor protein activates or represses the expression of many genes.…

We study optimal information provision in transportation networks when users are strategic and the network state is uncertain. An omniscient planner observes the network state and discloses information to the users with the goal of…

Pervasive personal communication technologies offer the potential for important social benefits for individual users, but also the potential for significant social difficulties and costs. In research on face-to-face social interaction,…

Living cells are continually exposed to environmental signals that vary in time. These signals are detected and processed by biochemical networks, which are often highly stochastic. To understand how cells cope with a fluctuating…

Emergent communication offers insight into how agents develop shared structured representations, yet most research assumes homogeneous modalities or aligned representational spaces, overlooking the perceptual heterogeneity of real-world…

We investigate the efficient transmission and processing of weak, subthreshold signals in a realistic neural medium in the presence of different levels of the underlying noise. Assuming Hebbian weights for maximal synaptic conductances --…

It is not, in general, possible to have access to all variables that determine the behavior of a system. Having identified a number of variables whose values can be accessed, there may still be hidden variables which influence the dynamics…

Understanding how different networks relate to each other is key for obtaining a greater insight into complex systems. Here, we introduce an intuitive yet powerful framework to characterise the relationship between two networks comprising…

Distributed computing models typically assume reliable communication between processors. While such assumptions often hold for engineered networks, e.g., due to underlying error correction protocols, their relevance to biological systems,…

In many real-world scenarios, experts must convey complex information with limited message capacity. This paper explores how the availability of messages influences an expert's persuasive ability. We develop a geometric representation of…

Exploiting the information provided by the molecular noise of a biological process has proven to be valuable in extracting knowledge about the underlying kinetic parameters and sources of variability from single cell measurements. However,…

This work studies the operation of multi-agent networks engaged in binary decision tasks, and derives performance expressions and performance operating curves under challenging conditions with some revealing insights. One of the main…

The evolution of symbolic communication is a longstanding open research question in biology. While some theories suggest that it originated from sub-symbolic communication (i.e., iconic or indexical), little experimental evidence exists on…

Networks of interacting, communicating subsystems are common in many fields, from ecology, biology, epidemiology to engineering and robotics. In the presence of noise and uncertainty, inter- actions between the individual components can…

We study the versatile performance of networks of coupled circuits. Each of these circuits is composed of a positive and a negative feedback loop in a motif that is frequently found in genetic and neural networks. When two of these circuits…

In both natural and engineered systems, communication often occurs dynamically over networks ranging from highly structured grids to largely disordered graphs. To use, or comprehend the use of, networks as efficient communication media…

Signal transduction, or signal-processing capability, is a fundamental property of nature that manifests universally across systems of different scales -- from quantum behaviour to the biological. This includes the detection of…

We consider signal transaction in a simple neuronal model featuring intrinsic noise. The presence of noise limits the precision of neural responses and impacts the quality of neural signal transduction. We assess the signal transduction…