63,251 research outputs found
Thermodynamics of natural images
The scale invariance of natural images suggests an analogy to the statistical
mechanics of physical systems at a critical point. Here we examine the
distribution of pixels in small image patches and show how to construct the
corresponding thermodynamics. We find evidence for criticality in a diverging
specific heat, which corresponds to large fluctuations in how "surprising" we
find individual images, and in the quantitative form of the entropy vs. energy.
The energy landscape derived from our thermodynamic framework identifies
special image configurations that have intrinsic error correcting properties,
and neurons which could detect these features have a strong resemblance to the
cells found in primary visual cortex
Learning and Acting in Peripersonal Space: Moving, Reaching, and Grasping
The young infant explores its body, its sensorimotor system, and the
immediately accessible parts of its environment, over the course of a few
months creating a model of peripersonal space useful for reaching and grasping
objects around it. Drawing on constraints from the empirical literature on
infant behavior, we present a preliminary computational model of this learning
process, implemented and evaluated on a physical robot. The learning agent
explores the relationship between the configuration space of the arm, sensing
joint angles through proprioception, and its visual perceptions of the hand and
grippers. The resulting knowledge is represented as the peripersonal space
(PPS) graph, where nodes represent states of the arm, edges represent safe
movements, and paths represent safe trajectories from one pose to another. In
our model, the learning process is driven by intrinsic motivation. When
repeatedly performing an action, the agent learns the typical result, but also
detects unusual outcomes, and is motivated to learn how to make those unusual
results reliable. Arm motions typically leave the static background unchanged,
but occasionally bump an object, changing its static position. The reach action
is learned as a reliable way to bump and move an object in the environment.
Similarly, once a reliable reach action is learned, it typically makes a
quasi-static change in the environment, moving an object from one static
position to another. The unusual outcome is that the object is accidentally
grasped (thanks to the innate Palmar reflex), and thereafter moves dynamically
with the hand. Learning to make grasps reliable is more complex than for
reaches, but we demonstrate significant progress. Our current results are steps
toward autonomous sensorimotor learning of motion, reaching, and grasping in
peripersonal space, based on unguided exploration and intrinsic motivation.Comment: 35 pages, 13 figure
Bayesian Discovery of Multiple Bayesian Networks via Transfer Learning
Bayesian network structure learning algorithms with limited data are being
used in domains such as systems biology and neuroscience to gain insight into
the underlying processes that produce observed data. Learning reliable networks
from limited data is difficult, therefore transfer learning can improve the
robustness of learned networks by leveraging data from related tasks. Existing
transfer learning algorithms for Bayesian network structure learning give a
single maximum a posteriori estimate of network models. Yet, many other models
may be equally likely, and so a more informative result is provided by Bayesian
structure discovery. Bayesian structure discovery algorithms estimate posterior
probabilities of structural features, such as edges. We present transfer
learning for Bayesian structure discovery which allows us to explore the shared
and unique structural features among related tasks. Efficient computation
requires that our transfer learning objective factors into local calculations,
which we prove is given by a broad class of transfer biases. Theoretically, we
show the efficiency of our approach. Empirically, we show that compared to
single task learning, transfer learning is better able to positively identify
true edges. We apply the method to whole-brain neuroimaging data.Comment: 10 page
Local Variation as a Statistical Hypothesis Test
The goal of image oversegmentation is to divide an image into several pieces,
each of which should ideally be part of an object. One of the simplest and yet
most effective oversegmentation algorithms is known as local variation (LV)
(Felzenszwalb and Huttenlocher 2004). In this work, we study this algorithm and
show that algorithms similar to LV can be devised by applying different
statistical models and decisions, thus providing further theoretical
justification and a well-founded explanation for the unexpected high
performance of the LV approach. Some of these algorithms are based on
statistics of natural images and on a hypothesis testing decision; we denote
these algorithms probabilistic local variation (pLV). The best pLV algorithm,
which relies on censored estimation, presents state-of-the-art results while
keeping the same computational complexity of the LV algorithm
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