Related papers: Ambiguous signals and efficient codes
Biological systems can share and collectively process information to yield emergent effects, despite inherent noise in communication. While man-made systems often employ intricate structural solutions to overcome noise, the structure of…
Does the asymptotic variance of the maximum composite likelihood estimator of a parameter of interest always decrease when the nuisance parameters are known? Will a composite likelihood necessarily become more efficient by incorporating…
To treat sensing limitations (with uncertainty in both conflation of information and noise) we model sensors as covers. This leads to a semilattice organization of abstract sensors that is appropriate even when additional information is…
The explanations of large language models have recently been shown to be sensitive to the randomness used for their training, creating a need to characterize this sensitivity. In this paper, we propose a characterization that questions the…
When individuals in a social network learn about an unknown state from private signals and neighbors' actions, the network structure often causes information loss. We consider rational agents and Gaussian signals in the canonical sequential…
In many natural synchronization phenomena, communication between individual elements occurs not directly, but rather through the environment. One of these instances is bacterial quorum sensing, where bacteria release signaling molecules in…
Biological synaptic transmission is unreliable, and this unreliability likely degrades neural circuit performance. While there are biophysical mechanisms that can increase reliability, for instance by increasing vesicle release probability,…
Private signals model noisy information about an unknown state. Although these signals are called "private," they may still carry information about each other. Our paper introduces the concept of private private signals, which contain…
Many cellular components are present in such low numbers that individual stochastic production and degradation events lead to significant fluctuations in molecular abundances. Although feedback control can, in principle, suppress such…
Many situations in physics, biology, and engineering consist of the transport of some physical quantity through a network of narrow channels. The ability of a network to transport such a quantity in every direction can be described by the…
Biological systems are characterized by the ubiquitous roles of weak, that is, non-covalent molecular interactions, small, often very small, numbers of specific molecules per cell, and Brownian motion. These combine to produce stochastic…
Quantum states naturally decay under noise. Many earlier works have quantified and demonstrated lower bounds on the decay rate, showing exponential decay in a wide variety of contexts. Here we study the converse question: are there uniform…
The emergence of collective decision in swarms and their coordinated response to complex environments underscore the central role played by social transmission of information. Here, the different possible origins of information flow…
We show that subsets of interacting oscillators may synchronize in different ways within a single network. This diversity of synchronization patterns is promoted by increasing the heterogeneous distribution of coupling weights and/or…
In order to survive, reproduce and (in multicellular organisms) differentiate, cells must control the concentrations of the myriad different proteins that are encoded in the genome. The precision of this control is limited by the inevitable…
Humans are able to communicate in sophisticated ways with only sparse signals, especially when cooperating. Two parallel theoretical perspectives on cooperative communication emphasize pragmatic reasoning and joint utility mechanisms to…
A cell routinely responds to one of many competing environmental cues. A fundamental question is whether the cell follows the cue prioritized by its internal signaling network or the cue that carries the most external information. We…
We study the coevolution of network structure and signaling behavior. We model agents who can preferentially associate with others in a dynamic network while they also learn to play a simple sender-receiver game. We have four major…
New binary classification tests are often evaluated relative to a pre-established test. For example, rapid Antigen tests for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 are assessed relative to more established PCR tests. In this paper, I argue that the…
We study navigation with limited information in networks and demonstrate that many real-world networks have a structure which can be described as favoring communication at short distance at the cost of constraining communication at long…