Related papers: Cognitive Friction: A Decision-Theoretic Framework…
The current reinforcement learning framework focuses exclusively on performance, often at the expense of efficiency. In contrast, biological control achieves remarkable performance while also optimizing computational energy expenditure and…
We present time-constrained automata (TCA), a model for hard real-time computation in which agents behaviors are modeled by automata and constrained by time intervals. TCA actions can have multiple start time and deadlines, can be…
Information-processing systems that coordinate multiple agents and objectives face fundamental thermodynamic constraints. We show that solutions with maximum utility to act as coordination focal points have a much higher selection pressure…
Roadway reconfiguration is a crucial aspect of transportation planning, aiming to enhance traffic flow, reduce congestion, and improve overall road network performance with existing infrastructure and resources. This paper presents a novel…
The proliferation of Generative Artificial Intelligence has transformed benign cognitive offloading into a systemic risk of cognitive agency surrender. Driven by the commercial dogma of "zero-friction" design, highly fluent AI interfaces…
Autonomous agentic systems are increasingly deployed in regulated, high-stakes domains where decisions may be irreversible and institutionally constrained. Existing safety approaches emphasize alignment, interpretability, or action-level…
High-precision CNC machining of free-form aerospace components requires bounded compensations informed by inspection, simulation, and process knowledge. Off-the-shelf large language model (LLM) assistants can generate text, but they do not…
Deploying language models as autonomous agents requires more than per-task accuracy: when an agent faces a queue of problems under a finite token budget, it must decide which to attempt, in what order, and how much compute to commit to…
Congestion games are popular models often used to study the system-level inefficiencies caused by selfish agents, typically measured by the price of anarchy. One may expect that aligning the agents' preferences with the system-level…
Knowledge graphs provide structured context for multi-hop question answering, but deployed systems must balance answer accuracy with strict latency and cost targets while preserving provenance. Static k-hop expansions and "think-longer"…
Objective: This paper develops a theoretical framework explaining when and why AI explanations enhance versus impair human decision-making. Background: Transparency is advocated as universally beneficial for human-AI interaction, yet…
We study the dynamic pricing problem with knapsack, addressing the challenge of balancing exploration and exploitation under resource constraints. We introduce three algorithms tailored to different informational settings: a Boundary…
Making decisions freely presupposes that there is some indeterminacy in the environment and in the decision making engine. The former is reflected on the behavioral changes due to communicating: few changes indicate rigid environments;…
Despite recent progress in video generation, inference speed remains a major bottleneck. A common acceleration strategy involves reusing model outputs via caching mechanisms at fixed intervals. However, we find that such fixed-frequency…
We develop a novel framework of bounded rationality under cognitive frictions that studies learning over optimal behavior through both deliberative reasoning and accumulated experiences. Using both types of information, agents engage in…
Optimal stopping is the problem of deciding when to stop a stochastic system to obtain the greatest reward, arising in numerous application areas such as finance, healthcare and marketing. State-of-the-art methods for high-dimensional…
Trajectory prediction models in autonomous driving are vulnerable to perturbations from non-causal agents whose actions should not affect the ego-agent's behavior. Such perturbations can lead to incorrect predictions of other agents'…
The next generation of autonomous AI systems will be constrained not only by model capability, but by how intelligence is structured across heterogeneous hardware. Current paradigms -- cloud-centric AI, on-device inference, and edge-cloud…
The emergence of large reasoning models demonstrates that scaling inference-time compute significantly enhances performance on complex tasks. However, it often falls into another trap: overthinking simple problems, where repetitive…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities and generalization in embodied manipulation. However, their decision-making relies on a fast, instinctive process that lacks deliberation. This strategy often…