1,114 research outputs found

    Symbol Emergence in Robotics: A Survey

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    Humans can learn the use of language through physical interaction with their environment and semiotic communication with other people. It is very important to obtain a computational understanding of how humans can form a symbol system and obtain semiotic skills through their autonomous mental development. Recently, many studies have been conducted on the construction of robotic systems and machine-learning methods that can learn the use of language through embodied multimodal interaction with their environment and other systems. Understanding human social interactions and developing a robot that can smoothly communicate with human users in the long term, requires an understanding of the dynamics of symbol systems and is crucially important. The embodied cognition and social interaction of participants gradually change a symbol system in a constructive manner. In this paper, we introduce a field of research called symbol emergence in robotics (SER). SER is a constructive approach towards an emergent symbol system. The emergent symbol system is socially self-organized through both semiotic communications and physical interactions with autonomous cognitive developmental agents, i.e., humans and developmental robots. Specifically, we describe some state-of-art research topics concerning SER, e.g., multimodal categorization, word discovery, and a double articulation analysis, that enable a robot to obtain words and their embodied meanings from raw sensory--motor information, including visual information, haptic information, auditory information, and acoustic speech signals, in a totally unsupervised manner. Finally, we suggest future directions of research in SER.Comment: submitted to Advanced Robotic

    A Multi-scale View of the Emergent Complexity of Life: A Free-energy Proposal

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    We review some of the main implications of the free-energy principle (FEP) for the study of the self-organization of living systems – and how the FEP can help us to understand (and model) biotic self-organization across the many temporal and spatial scales over which life exists. In order to maintain its integrity as a bounded system, any biological system - from single cells to complex organisms and societies - has to limit the disorder or dispersion (i.e., the long-run entropy) of its constituent states. We review how this can be achieved by living systems that minimize their variational free energy. Variational free energy is an information theoretic construct, originally introduced into theoretical neuroscience and biology to explain perception, action, and learning. It has since been extended to explain the evolution, development, form, and function of entire organisms, providing a principled model of biotic self-organization and autopoiesis. It has provided insights into biological systems across spatiotemporal scales, ranging from microscales (e.g., sub- and multicellular dynamics), to intermediate scales (e.g., groups of interacting animals and culture), through to macroscale phenomena (the evolution of entire species). A crucial corollary of the FEP is that an organism just is (i.e., embodies or entails) an implicit model of its environment. As such, organisms come to embody causal relationships of their ecological niche, which, in turn, is influenced by their resulting behaviors. Crucially, free-energy minimization can be shown to be equivalent to the maximization of Bayesian model evidence. This allows us to cast natural selection in terms of Bayesian model selection, providing a robust theoretical account of how organisms come to match or accommodate the spatiotemporal complexity of their surrounding niche. In line with the theme of this volume; namely, biological complexity and self-organization, this chapter will examine a variational approach to self-organization across multiple dynamical scales

    When Language Evolution Meets Multimodality: Current Status and Challenges Toward Multimodal Computational Models

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    Computational models can be considered human-designed computing models inspired by the processes observed in the natural world, which allow simulating and understanding these processes. Computational modelling is notably applied to simulate the behaviour and long-term dynamics of human Language. The research effort made so far in computational modelling of language evolution considers predominantly one modality by arguing for a unimodal origin of Language. This article extends this paradigm to a new perspective that integrates into its structure and learning algorithms principles from multimodal communication. This article gives an overview of the current language evolution models. It discusses the key challenges towards multimodal language evolution modelling by envisioning a conceptual framework to design the multimodal grounding and the language learning processes, as well as their realisation through a multi-agent multimodal referential game. This framework is valuable for many researchers working on language evolution to reveal the key questions they should address and integrate for pursuing a holistic vision that combines all modalities in a multimodal language evolution model

    A brief review of neural networks based learning and control and their applications for robots

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    As an imitation of the biological nervous systems, neural networks (NN), which are characterized with powerful learning ability, have been employed in a wide range of applications, such as control of complex nonlinear systems, optimization, system identification and patterns recognition etc. This article aims to bring a brief review of the state-of-art NN for the complex nonlinear systems. Recent progresses of NNs in both theoretical developments and practical applications are investigated and surveyed. Specifically, NN based robot learning and control applications were further reviewed, including NN based robot manipulator control, NN based human robot interaction and NN based behavior recognition and generation

    Deep Learning Techniques for Music Generation -- A Survey

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    This paper is a survey and an analysis of different ways of using deep learning (deep artificial neural networks) to generate musical content. We propose a methodology based on five dimensions for our analysis: Objective - What musical content is to be generated? Examples are: melody, polyphony, accompaniment or counterpoint. - For what destination and for what use? To be performed by a human(s) (in the case of a musical score), or by a machine (in the case of an audio file). Representation - What are the concepts to be manipulated? Examples are: waveform, spectrogram, note, chord, meter and beat. - What format is to be used? Examples are: MIDI, piano roll or text. - How will the representation be encoded? Examples are: scalar, one-hot or many-hot. Architecture - What type(s) of deep neural network is (are) to be used? Examples are: feedforward network, recurrent network, autoencoder or generative adversarial networks. Challenge - What are the limitations and open challenges? Examples are: variability, interactivity and creativity. Strategy - How do we model and control the process of generation? Examples are: single-step feedforward, iterative feedforward, sampling or input manipulation. For each dimension, we conduct a comparative analysis of various models and techniques and we propose some tentative multidimensional typology. This typology is bottom-up, based on the analysis of many existing deep-learning based systems for music generation selected from the relevant literature. These systems are described and are used to exemplify the various choices of objective, representation, architecture, challenge and strategy. The last section includes some discussion and some prospects.Comment: 209 pages. This paper is a simplified version of the book: J.-P. Briot, G. Hadjeres and F.-D. Pachet, Deep Learning Techniques for Music Generation, Computational Synthesis and Creative Systems, Springer, 201

    Empathic processes and conscious perception: intersubjectivity at the basis of consciousness

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    L’intersoggettività definisce la natura dell’essere umano, il quale è prima di tutto un essere sociale, che nasce e si sviluppa nella relazione con l’altro. Partendo da questo presupposto, anche la coscienza e la consapevolezza di sé possono essere considerate di natura intersoggettiva, dal momento che si plasmano a partire dalla relazione con l’altro significativo. Nella presente tesi si è cercato di indagare tale relazione anche ad un livello più profondamente neurale e cognitivo, tramite tecniche psicofisiologiche e comportamentali.Intersubjectivity defines the nature of the human being, that first of all is a social being, that is born and develops in the relationship with the other person. Starting from this assumption, even consciousness and the Self can be considered as having an intersubjective nature, since they are formed from the relationship with the significant Other. In the present thesis, it has been tried to investigate this relationship between empathy and consciousness, even at a deeper neural and cognitive level, through psychophysiological and behavioural tecnhiques
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