Related papers: I am the cat who walks by himself
Autonomous exploration is a widely studied problem where a robot incrementally builds a map of a previously unknown environment. The robot selects the next locations to reach using an exploration strategy. To do so, the robot has to balance…
The Fr\'echet distance is a computational mainstay for comparing polygonal curves. The Fr\'echet distance under translation, which is a translation invariant version, considers the similarity of two curves independent of their location in…
Dialects suffer from the scarcity of computational textual resources as they exist predominantly in spoken rather than written form and exhibit remarkable geographical diversity. Collecting dialect data and subsequently integrating it into…
This work introduces MAYA, a sequential imitation learning model based on multi-armed bandits, designed to reproduce and predict individual bees' decisions in contextualized foraging tasks. The model accounts for bees' limited memory…
Autonomous exploration allows mobile robots to navigate in initially unknown territories in order to build complete representations of the environments. In many real-life applications, environments often contain dynamic obstacles which can…
I met Peter J. Bickel for the first time in 1981. He came to Jerusalem for a year; I had just started working on my Ph.D. studies. Yossi Yahav, who was my advisor at this time, busy as the Dean of Social Sciences, brought us together. Peter…
We study the degree of success of a single predator hunting a herd of prey on a two dimensional square lattice landscape. We explicitly consider the self volume of the prey restraining their dynamics on the lattice. The movement of both…
Self-supervised goal proposal and reaching is a key component for exploration and efficient policy learning algorithms. Such a self-supervised approach without access to any oracle goal sampling distribution requires deep exploration and…
Despite impressive successes, deep reinforcement learning (RL) systems still fall short of human performance on generalization to new tasks and environments that differ from their training. As a benchmark tailored for studying RL…
The brain is very often viewed as a network, be it at small scale made of cells, mostly neurons, or at larger scale made of neuronal assemblies. Here we introduce a conjecture, in the spirit of a philosophical though experiment, which…
The game of Cat Herding is one in which cat and herder players alternate turns, with the evasive cat moving along non-trivial paths between vertices, and the herder deleting single edges from the graph. Eventually the cat cannot move, and…
In this document we present DYOR, an educational robot that you can make at home or at class. The robot has been created by students at the Universitat Polit\'ecnica de Val\`encia and me through their projects and masther thesis and it has…
We solve an adaptive search model where a random walker or L\'evy flight stochastically resets to previously visited sites on a $d$-dimensional lattice containing one trapping site. Due to reinforcement, a phase transition occurs when the…
We investigate a famous decision problem in automata theory: separation. Given a class of language C, the separation problem for C takes as input two regular languages and asks whether there exists a third one which belongs to C, includes…
We reflect on the design of a multispecies world centred around a bespoke enclosure in which three cats and a robot arm coexist for six hours a day during a twelve-day installation as part of an artist-led project. In this paper, we present…
Solving complex real-world tasks requires cycles of actions and observations. This is particularly true in science, where tasks require many cycles of analysis, tool use, and experimentation. Language agents are promising for automating…
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a transformative force across global societies, reshaping the ways we communicate, collaborate, and make decisions. Yet, as AI systems increasingly mediate interactions between humans, questions about…
Walking animals, like stick insects, cockroaches or ants, demonstrate a fascinating range of locomotive abilities and complex behaviors. The locomotive behaviors can consist of a variety of walking patterns along with adaptation that allow…
I have merged the lecture notes (in french) of two 24 hour courses I taught at the university Pierre-et-Marie Curie (Paris 6) during the first semester of the academic year 2013-2014. The first one was devoted to the general material that…
The existence of 'what' and 'where' pathways of information processing in the brain was proposed almost 30 years ago, but there is still a lack of a clear mathematical model that could show how these pathways work together. We propose a…