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Imitation is widely observed in populations of decision-making agents. Using our recent convergence results for asynchronous imitation dynamics on networks, we consider how such networks can be efficiently driven to a desired equilibrium…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-04-17 James Riehl , Pouria Ramazi , Ming Cao

Even if a probability distribution is properly normalizable, its associated Shannon (or von Neumann) entropy can easily be infinite. We carefully analyze conditions under which this phenomenon can occur. Roughly speaking, this happens when…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2013-04-04 Valentina Baccetti , Matt Visser

A cornerstone of our understanding of both biological and artificial neural networks is that they store information in the strengths of synaptic connections among the neurons. However, in contrast to the well-established theory for…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2026-04-29 Xinhao Fan , Shreesh P Mysore

We explore the connection between deep learning and information theory through the paradigm of diffusion models. A diffusion model converts noise into structured data by reinstating, imperfectly, information that is erased when data was…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Akhil Premkumar

Upper and lower bounds are obtained for the joint entropy of a collection of random variables in terms of an arbitrary collection of subset joint entropies. These inequalities generalize Shannon's chain rule for entropy as well as…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2024-05-07 Mokshay Madiman , Prasad Tetali

Thermodynamic uncertainty relations reveal a fundamental trade-off between the precision of a trajectory observable and entropy production, where the uncertainty of the observable is quantified by its variance. In information theory,…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2025-11-25 Yoshihiko Hasegawa , Tomohiro Nishiyama

I consider motivation and value-alignment in AI systems from the perspective of (constrained) entropy maximization. Though the structures encoding knowledge in any physical system can be understood as energetic constraints, only living…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-08-29 Alex B. Kiefer

Despite the wide usage of information as a concept in science, we have yet to develop a clear & concise scientific definition. This paper is aimed at laying the foundations for a new theory concerning the mechanics of information alongside…

General Physics · Physics 2017-07-13 Kiyam Lin , SongLing Lin

After Shannon, entropy becomes a fundamental quantity to describe not only uncertainity or chaos of a system but also information carried by the system. Shannon's important discovery is to give a mathematical expression of the mutual…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Masanori Ohya

Autonomous robots need to be able to adapt to unforeseen situations and to acquire new skills through trial and error. Reinforcement learning in principle offers a suitable methodological framework for this kind of autonomous learning.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-08-02 Nikolas J. Hemion

Subword tokenization is a key part of many NLP pipelines. However, little is known about why some tokenizer and hyperparameter combinations lead to better downstream model performance than others. We propose that good tokenizers lead to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-06-30 Vilém Zouhar , Clara Meister , Juan Luis Gastaldi , Li Du , Mrinmaya Sachan , Ryan Cotterell

Deep reinforcement learning has proven to be a great success in allowing agents to learn complex tasks. However, its application to actual robots can be prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, the unpredictability of human behavior in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-08-16 Mohammad Thabet , Massimiliano Patacchiola , Angelo Cangelosi

We introduce an ambidextrous view of stochastic dynamical systems, comparing their forward-time and reverse-time representations and then integrating them into a single time-symmetric representation. The perspective is useful theoretically,…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2015-05-13 Christopher J. Ellison , John R. Mahoney , James P. Crutchfield

Parallel data collection has redefined Reinforcement Learning (RL), unlocking unprecedented efficiency and powering breakthroughs in large-scale real-world applications. In this paradigm, $N$ identical agents operate in $N$ replicas of an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-25 Vincenzo De Paola , Riccardo Zamboni , Mirco Mutti , Marcello Restelli

In view of the relation between information and thermodynamics we investigate how much information about an external protocol can be stored in the memory of a stochastic measurement device given an energy budget. We consider a layered…

Quantitative Methods · Quantitative Biology 2015-07-28 Stefano Bo , Marco Del Giudice , Antonio Celani

As multi-agent networks grow in size and scale, they become increasingly difficult to synchronize, though agents must work together even when generating and sharing different information at different times. Targeting such cases, this paper…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-09-18 Stefan Hochhaus , Matthew Hale

This paper proposes a method to construct an adaptive agent that is universal with respect to a given class of experts, where each expert is an agent that has been designed specifically for a particular environment. This adaptive control…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2010-04-13 Pedro A. Ortega , Daniel A. Braun

We propose a new interpretation of measures of information and disorder by connecting these concepts to group theory in a new way. Entropy and group theory are connected here by their common relation to sets of permutations. A combinatorial…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2019-11-25 David J. Galas

Transfer entropy is capable of capturing nonlinear source-destination relations between multi-variate time series. It is a measure of association between source data that are transformed into destination data via a set of linear…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2019-05-28 David Sigtermans

The major problem in information theoretic analysis of neural responses and other biological data is the reliable estimation of entropy--like quantities from small samples. We apply a recently introduced Bayesian entropy estimator to…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2009-09-29 Ilya Nemenman , William Bialek , Rob de Ruyter van Steveninck