49,023 research outputs found
Evolutionary Robotics: a new scientific tool for studying cognition
We survey developments in Artificial Neural Networks, in Behaviour-based Robotics and Evolutionary Algorithms that set the stage for Evolutionary Robotics in the 1990s. We examine the motivations for using ER as a scientific tool for studying minimal models of cognition, with the advantage of being capable of generating integrated sensorimotor systems with minimal (or controllable) prejudices. These systems must act as a whole in close coupling with their environments which is an essential aspect of real cognition that is often either bypassed or modelled poorly in other disciplines. We demonstrate with three example studies: homeostasis under visual inversion; the origins of learning; and the ontogenetic acquisition of entrainment
An information theory based behavioral model for agent-based crowd simulations
Crowds must be simulated believable in terms of their appearance and behavior to improve a virtual environment’s realism. Due to the complex nature of human behavior, realistic behavior of agents in crowd simulations is still a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel behavioral model which builds analytical maps to control agents’ behavior adaptively with agent-crowd interaction formulations. We introduce information theoretical concepts to construct analytical maps automatically. Our model can be integrated into crowd simulators and enhance their behavioral complexity. We made comparative analyses
of the presented behavior model with measured crowd data and two agent-based crowd simulators
Neuroethology, Computational
Over the past decade, a number of neural network researchers have used the term computational neuroethology to describe a specific approach to neuroethology. Neuroethology is the study of the neural mechanisms underlying the generation of behavior in animals, and hence it lies at the intersection of neuroscience (the study of nervous systems) and ethology (the study of animal behavior); for an introduction to neuroethology, see Simmons and Young (1999). The definition of computational neuroethology is very similar, but is not quite so dependent on studying animals: animals just happen to be biological autonomous agents. But there are also non-biological autonomous agents such as some types of robots, and some types of simulated embodied agents operating in virtual worlds. In this context, autonomous agents are self-governing entities capable of operating (i.e., coordinating perception and action) for extended periods of time in environments that are complex, uncertain, and dynamic. Thus, computational neuroethology can be characterised as the attempt to analyze the computational principles underlying the generation of behavior in animals and in artificial autonomous agents
Learning recurrent representations for hierarchical behavior modeling
We propose a framework for detecting action patterns from motion sequences
and modeling the sensory-motor relationship of animals, using a generative
recurrent neural network. The network has a discriminative part (classifying
actions) and a generative part (predicting motion), whose recurrent cells are
laterally connected, allowing higher levels of the network to represent high
level phenomena. We test our framework on two types of data, fruit fly behavior
and online handwriting. Our results show that 1) taking advantage of unlabeled
sequences, by predicting future motion, significantly improves action detection
performance when training labels are scarce, 2) the network learns to represent
high level phenomena such as writer identity and fly gender, without
supervision, and 3) simulated motion trajectories, generated by treating motion
prediction as input to the network, look realistic and may be used to
qualitatively evaluate whether the model has learnt generative control rules
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