Related papers: Ideas are Not Replicators but Minds Are
Counterfactual Thinking is a human cognitive ability studied in a wide variety of domains. It captures the process of reasoning about a past event that did not occur, namely what would have happened had this event occurred, or, otherwise,…
What is information, physically, and why does it so reliably emerge in living, cultural, and technological systems? Existing theories quantify uncertainty, cost, or compressibility, but do not identify which physical structures count as…
The visual representation of concepts or ideas through the use of simple shapes has always been explored in the history of Humanity, and it is believed to be the origin of writing. We focus on computational generation of visual symbols to…
Enabling artificial intelligence systems, particularly large language models, to integrate new knowledge and flexibly apply it during reasoning remains a central challenge. Existing knowledge editing approaches emphasize atomic facts,…
"Cognizing" (e.g., thinking, understanding, and knowing) is a mental state. Systems without mental states, such as cognitive technology, can sometimes contribute to human cognition, but that does not make them cognizers. Cognizers can…
Creativity is perhaps what most differentiates humans from other species. It involves the capacity to shift between divergent and convergent modes of thought in response to task demands. Divergent thought has been characterized as the kind…
What would a human hundreds or thousands times more intelligent than the brightest human ever born be like? We must admit we can hardly guess. A human being of such intelligence will be so radically different from us that it can hardly, if…
Imitation learning is a widely used policy learning method that enables intelligent agents to acquire complex skills from expert demonstrations. The input to the imitation learning algorithm is usually composed of both the current…
Transformers can generate predictions in two approaches: 1. auto-regressively by conditioning each sequence element on the previous ones, or 2. directly produce an output sequences in parallel. While research has mostly explored upon this…
Vectors are universal mathematical objects that can represent text, images, speech, or a mix of these data modalities. That happens regardless of whether data is represented by hand-crafted features or learnt embeddings. Collect a large…
The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence has led to expectations of transformative impact on science, yet current systems remain fundamentally limited in enabling genuine scientific discovery. This perspective contends that progress…
How do people acquire rich, flexible knowledge about their environment from others despite limited cognitive capacity? Humans are often thought to rely on computationally costly mentalizing, such as inferring others' beliefs. In contrast,…
The causal structure of cognition can be simulated but not implemented computationally, just as the causal structure of a comet can be simulated but not implemented computationally. The only thing that allows us even to imagine otherwise is…
A fundamental feature of human intelligence is that we accumulate and transfer knowledge as a society and across generations. We describe here a network architecture for the human brain that may support this feature and suggest that two key…
Learning algorithms need generally the possibility to compare several streams of information. Neural learning architectures hence need a unit, a comparator, able to compare several inputs encoding either internal or external information,…
Theories of innovation emphasize the role of social networks and teams as facilitators of breakthrough discoveries. Around the world, scientists and inventors today are more plentiful and interconnected than ever before. But while there are…
Humans readily generalize, applying prior knowledge to novel situations and stimuli. Advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence have begun to approximate and even surpass human performance, but machine systems reliably…
How humans interpret and produce images is influenced by the images we have been exposed to. Similarly, visual generative AI models are exposed to many training images and learn to generate new images based on this. Given the importance of…
We have a lot of relation to the encoding and the Theory of Information, when considering thinking. This is a natural process and, at once, the complex thing we investigate. This always was a challenge - to understand how our mind works,…
Developing a novel research idea is hard. It must be distinct enough from prior work to claim a contribution while also building on it. This requires iteratively reviewing literature and refining an idea based on what a researcher reads;…