Related papers: Ambiguous signals and efficient codes
Information of relevance to the organism often is represented by the concentrations of particular molecules inside a cell. As outside observers we can now measure these concentrations precisely, but the cell's own mechanisms must be…
Large language models often respond to ambiguous requests by implicitly committing to one interpretation, frustrating users and creating safety risks when that interpretation is wrong. We propose generating a single structured response that…
A model for autonomous feedback control of particle transport through a large number of channels is introduced. Interactions among the particles can lead to a strong suppression of fluctuations in the particle number statistics. Within a…
The mutual information between a set of stimuli and the elicited neural responses is compared to the corresponding decoded information. The decoding procedure is presented as an artificial distortion of the joint probabilities between…
Routing information through networks is a universal phenomenon in both natural and manmade complex systems. When each node has full knowledge of the global network connectivity, finding short communication paths is merely a matter of…
When users lack specific knowledge of various system parameters, their uncertainty may lead them to make undesirable deviations in their decision making. To alleviate this, an informed system operator may elect to signal information to…
We analyze the accuracy of collective decision-making in socially connected populations, where agents update binary choices through local interactions on a network. Each agent receives a private signal that is biased -- even marginally --…
Neuronal responses are conspicuously variable. We focus on one particular aspect of that variability: the precision of action potential timing. We show that for common models of noisy spike generation, elementary considerations imply that…
We consider a Bayesian persuasion problem where the persuader and the decision maker communicate through an imperfect channel that has a fixed and limited number of messages and is subject to exogenous noise. We provide an upper bound on…
This paper studies the organization of communication between biased senders and a receiver. Senders can misreport their private information at a cost. Efficiency is achieved by clearing information asymmetries without incurring costs.…
Biological systems (among others) may respond to a large variety of distinct external stimuli, or signals. These perturbations will generally be presented to the system not singly, but in various combinations, so that a proper understanding…
Ambiguity in natural language poses significant challenges to Large Language Models (LLMs) used for open-domain question answering. LLMs often struggle with the inherent uncertainties of human communication, leading to misinterpretations,…
Understanding relationship between noisy dynamics and biological network architecture is a fundamentally important question, particularly in order to elucidate how cells encode and process information. We analytically and numerically…
Vocabulary learning by children can be characterized by many biases. When encountering a new word, children as well as adults, are biased towards assuming that it means something totally different from the words that they already know. To…
User queries are often underspecified and may admit multiple valid interpretations. Rather than silently making assumptions about the user's intent, a helpful assistant should surface such ambiguity by asking a clarifying question. Doing so…
Units of complex systems -- such as neurons in the brain or individuals in societies -- must communicate efficiently to function properly: e.g., allowing electrochemical signals to travel quickly among functionally connected neuronal areas…
The bias/variance tradeoff is fundamental to learning: increasing a model's complexity can improve its fit on training data, but potentially worsens performance on future samples. Remarkably, however, the human brain effortlessly handles a…
Trustworthy language models should abstain from answering questions when they do not know the answer. However, the answer to a question can be unknown for a variety of reasons. Prior research has focused on the case in which the question is…
Concurrent presence of inter-cell and intra-cell interferences constitutes a major impediment to reliable downlink transmission in multi-cell multiuser networks. Harnessing such interferences largely hinges on two levels of information…
Despite the frequent challenges posed by ambiguity when representing meaning via natural language, it is often ignored or deliberately removed in tasks mapping language to formally-designed representations, which generally assume a…