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Browsing by Author "Catenacci Volpi, Nicola"
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The Cat Is On the Mat. Or Is It a Dog? Dynamic Competition in Perceptual Decision Making
Quinton, Jean Charles; Catenacci Volpi, Nicola; Barca, Laura; Pezzulo, Giovanni (2013-09-06)Recent neurobiological findings suggest that the brain solves simple perceptual decision-making tasks by means of a dynamic competition in which evidence is accumulated in favor of the alternatives. However, it is unclear ... -
Computation of Empowerment for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle
Catenacci Volpi, Nicola; De Palma, Daniela; Polani, Daniel; Indiveri, Giovanni (2016-02-25)The paper addresses the computation of the information-theoretic empowerment measure for a simplified vertical plane dynamic model of an eFolaga autonomous underwater vehicle. Empowerment can be used to measure how much ... -
Decoupled Sampling-Based Motion Planning for Multiple Autonomous Marine Vehicles
Catenacci Volpi, Nicola; Smith, Simón C.; Pascoal, António; Simetti, Enrico; Turetta, Alessio; Alibani, Michael; Polani, Daniel (2018-10-26)There is increasing interest in the deployment and operation of multiple autonomous marine vehicles (AMVs) for a number of challenging scientific and commercial operational mission scenarios. Some of the missions, such as ... -
Exact and Soft Successive Refinement of the Information Bottleneck
Charvin, Hippolyte; Catenacci Volpi, Nicola; Polani, Daniel (2023-09-19)The information bottleneck (IB) framework formalises the essential requirement for efficient information processing systems to achieve an optimal balance between the complexity of their representation and the amount of ... -
Goal-directed Empowerment: combining Intrinsic Motivation and Task-oriented Behaviour
Catenacci Volpi, Nicola; Polani, Daniel (2020-12-07)Empowerment is an information-theoretic measure representing the capacity of an agent to affect its environment. It quantifies its ability to inject information in the environment via its actions and to recapture this ... -
How active perception and attractor dynamics shape perceptual categorization: A computational model
Catenacci Volpi, Nicola; Quinton, Jean Charles; Pezzulo, Giovanni (2014-07-23)We propose a computational model of perceptual categorization that fuses elements of grounded and sensorimotor theories of cognition with dynamic models of decision-making. We assume that category information consists in ... -
Leveraging Empowerment to Model Tool Use in Reinforcement Learning
Rasheed, Faizan; Polani, Daniel; Catenacci Volpi, Nicola (2023-12-25)Intrinsic motivation plays a key role in learning how to use tools, a fundamental aspect of human cultural evolution and child development that remains largely unexplored within the context of Reinforcement Learning (RL). ... -
Skilled motor control of an inverted pendulum implies low entropy of states but high entropy of actions
Catenacci Volpi, Nicola; Greaves, Martin; Trendafilov, Dari; Salge, Christoph; Pezzulo, Giovanni; Polani, Daniel (2023-01-06)The mastery of skills, such as balancing an inverted pendulum, implies a very accurate control of movements to achieve the task goals. Traditional accounts of skilled action control that focus on either routinization or ... -
Space emerges from what we know - spatial categorisations induced by information constraints
Catenacci Volpi, Nicola; Polani, Daniel (2020-10-19)Seeking goals carried out by agents with a level of competency requires an “understanding” of the structure of their world. While abstract formal descriptions of a world structure in terms of geometric axioms can be ... -
A space of goals: the cognitive geometry of informationally bounded agents : the cognitive geometry of informationally bounded agents
Archer, Karen; Catenacci Volpi, Nicola; Bröker, Franziska; Polani, Daniel (2022-12-07)Traditionally, Euclidean geometry is treated by scientists as a priori and objective. However, when we take the position of an agent, the problem of selecting a best route should also factor in the abilities of the agent, ... -
Successive Refinement and Coarsening of the Information Bottleneck
Charvin, Hippolyte; Catenacci Volpi, Nicola; Polani, Daniel (2022-11-21)We study two central aspects of information processing in cognitive systems: one is the ability to incorporate fresh information to already learnt models; the other is the “trickling” of information through the many layers ... -
Towards Information Theory-Based Discovery of Equivariances
Charvin, Hippolyte; Catenacci Volpi, Nicola; Polani, Daniel (2023-11-29)The presence of symmetries imposes a stringent set of constraints on a system. This constrained structure allows intelligent agents interacting with such a system to drasti- cally improve the efficiency of learning and ...