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How do social animals make effective decisions in the absence of a leader? While coordination can improve accuracy, it also introduces delays as information propagates through the group. In changing environments, these delays can outweigh…
Many networks are used to transfer information or goods, in other words, they are navigated. The larger the network, the more difficult it is to navigate efficiently. Indeed, information routing in the Internet faces serious scalability…
We introduce an idealized model of an intelligent forager in which higher intelligence corresponds to a larger spatial range over which the forager can detect food. Such a forager diffuses randomly whenever the nearest food is more distant…
Living in groups brings benefits to many animals, such as a protection against predators and an improved capacity for sensing and making decisions while searching for resources in uncertain environments. A body of studies has shown how…
There is a strong link between the general concept of intelligence and the ability to collect and use information. The theory of Bayes-adaptive exploration offers an attractive optimality framework for training machines to perform complex…
In a recent paper, we analyzed the self-assembly of a complex cooperation network. The network was shown to approach a state where every agent invests the same amount of resources. Nevertheless, highly-connected agents arise that extract…
Collective foragers, from animals to robotic swarms, must balance exploration and exploitation to locate sparse resources efficiently. While social learning is known to facilitate this balance, how the range of information sharing shapes…
Since Nowak & May's (1992) influential paper, network reciprocity--the fact that individuals' interactions repeated within a local neighborhood support the evolution of cooperation--has been confirmed in several theoretical models.…
When multiple innovations compete for adoption, historical chance leading to early advantage can generate lock-in effects that allow suboptimal innovations to succeed at the expense of superior alternatives. Research on the diffusion of…
We investigate the matching of agents to resources in a computational ecology configured to present heterogeneous resource patches to evolving, neurally controlled agents. We repeatedly find a nearly optimal, ideal free distribution (IFD)…
In this paper we study the problem of information sharing among rational self-interested agents as a dynamic game of asymmetric information. We assume that the agents imperfectly observe a Markov chain and they are called to decide whether…
Content dissemination networks are pervasive in todays Internet. Examples of content dissemination networks include peer-to-peer networks (P2P), content distribution networks (CDN) and information centric networks (ICN). In this paper, we…
Sparse reward environments are known to be challenging for reinforcement learning agents. In such environments, efficient and scalable exploration is crucial. Exploration is a means by which an agent gains information about the environment.…
Foraging is crucial for animals to survive. Many species forage in groups, as individuals communicate to share information about the location of available resources. For example, eusocial foragers, such as honey bees and many ants, recruit…
We study a crowdsourcing problem where the platform aims to incentivize distributed workers to provide high quality and truthful solutions without the ability to verify the solutions. While most prior work assumes that the platform and…
Collaboration is a fundamental and essential characteristic of many complex systems, ranging from ant colonies to human societies. Each component within a complex system interacts with others, even at a distance, to accomplish a given task.…
In many online systems, individuals provide services for each other; the recipient of the service obtains a benefit but the provider of the service incurs a cost. If benefit exceeds cost, provision of the service increases social welfare…
Reward shaping is effective in addressing the sparse-reward challenge in reinforcement learning (RL) by providing immediate feedback through auxiliary, informative rewards. Based on the reward shaping strategy, we propose a novel multi-task…
Animals foraging alone are hypothesized to optimize the encounter rates with resources through L\'evy walks. However, the issue of how the interactions between multiple foragers influence their search efficiency is still not completely…
A monopolist faces a partially uninformed population of consumers, interconnected through a directed social network. In the network, the monopolist offers rewards to informed consumers (influencers) conditional on informing uninformed…