9,332 research outputs found
A model of ant route navigation driven by scene familiarity
In this paper we propose a model of visually guided route navigation in ants that captures the known properties of real behaviour whilst retaining mechanistic simplicity and thus biological plausibility. For an ant, the coupling of movement and viewing direction means that a familiar view specifies a familiar direction of movement. Since the views experienced along a habitual route will be more familiar, route navigation can be re-cast as a search for familiar views. This search can be performed with a simple scanning routine, a behaviour that ants have been observed to perform. We test this proposed route navigation strategy in simulation, by learning a series of routes through visually cluttered environments consisting of objects that are only distinguishable as silhouettes against the sky. In the first instance we determine view familiarity by exhaustive comparison with the set of views experienced during training. In further experiments we train an artificial neural network to perform familiarity discrimination using the training views. Our results indicate that, not only is the approach successful, but also that the routes that are learnt show many of the characteristics of the routes of desert ants. As such, we believe the model represents the only detailed and complete model of insect route guidance to date. What is more, the model provides a general demonstration that visually guided routes can be produced with parsimonious mechanisms that do not specify when or what to learn, nor separate routes into sequences of waypoints
Efficient Computation of Subspace Skyline over Categorical Domains
Platforms such as AirBnB, Zillow, Yelp, and related sites have transformed
the way we search for accommodation, restaurants, etc. The underlying datasets
in such applications have numerous attributes that are mostly Boolean or
Categorical. Discovering the skyline of such datasets over a subset of
attributes would identify entries that stand out while enabling numerous
applications. There are only a few algorithms designed to compute the skyline
over categorical attributes, yet are applicable only when the number of
attributes is small.
In this paper, we place the problem of skyline discovery over categorical
attributes into perspective and design efficient algorithms for two cases. (i)
In the absence of indices, we propose two algorithms, ST-S and ST-P, that
exploits the categorical characteristics of the datasets, organizing tuples in
a tree data structure, supporting efficient dominance tests over the candidate
set. (ii) We then consider the existence of widely used precomputed sorted
lists. After discussing several approaches, and studying their limitations, we
propose TA-SKY, a novel threshold style algorithm that utilizes sorted lists.
Moreover, we further optimize TA-SKY and explore its progressive nature, making
it suitable for applications with strict interactive requirements. In addition
to the extensive theoretical analysis of the proposed algorithms, we conduct a
comprehensive experimental evaluation of the combination of real (including the
entire AirBnB data collection) and synthetic datasets to study the practicality
of the proposed algorithms. The results showcase the superior performance of
our techniques, outperforming applicable approaches by orders of magnitude
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