2,023 research outputs found
Optimal control methods for simulating the perception of causality in young infants
There is a growing debate among developmental theorists concerning the perception of causality in young infants. Some theorists advocate a top-down view, e.g., that infants reason about causal events on the basis of intuitive physical principles. Others argue instead for a bottom-up view of infant causal knowledge, in which causal perception emerges from a simple set of associative learning rules. In order to test the limits of the bottom-up view, we propose an optimal control model (OCM) of infant causal perception. OCM is trained to find an optimal pattern of eye movements for maintaining sight of a target object. We first present a series of simulations which illustrate OCM's ability to anticipate the outcome of novel, occluded causal events, and then compare OCM's performance with that of 9-month-old infants. The impications for developmental theory and research are discusse
Robustly Solvable Constraint Satisfaction Problems
An algorithm for a constraint satisfaction problem is called robust if it
outputs an assignment satisfying at least -fraction of the
constraints given a -satisfiable instance, where
as . Guruswami and
Zhou conjectured a characterization of constraint languages for which the
corresponding constraint satisfaction problem admits an efficient robust
algorithm. This paper confirms their conjecture
Deciding absorption
We characterize absorption in finite idempotent algebras by means of
J\'onsson absorption and cube term blockers. As an application we show that it
is decidable whether a given subset is an absorbing subuniverse of an algebra
given by the tables of its basic operations
The algebraic dichotomy conjecture for infinite domain Constraint Satisfaction Problems
We prove that an -categorical core structure primitively positively
interprets all finite structures with parameters if and only if some stabilizer
of its polymorphism clone has a homomorphism to the clone of projections, and
that this happens if and only if its polymorphism clone does not contain
operations , , satisfying the identity .
This establishes an algebraic criterion equivalent to the conjectured
borderline between P and NP-complete CSPs over reducts of finitely bounded
homogenous structures, and accomplishes one of the steps of a proposed strategy
for reducing the infinite domain CSP dichotomy conjecture to the finite case.
Our theorem is also of independent mathematical interest, characterizing a
topological property of any -categorical core structure (the existence
of a continuous homomorphism of a stabilizer of its polymorphism clone to the
projections) in purely algebraic terms (the failure of an identity as above).Comment: 15 page
The wonderland of reflections
A fundamental fact for the algebraic theory of constraint satisfaction
problems (CSPs) over a fixed template is that pp-interpretations between at
most countable \omega-categorical relational structures have two algebraic
counterparts for their polymorphism clones: a semantic one via the standard
algebraic operators H, S, P, and a syntactic one via clone homomorphisms
(capturing identities). We provide a similar characterization which
incorporates all relational constructions relevant for CSPs, that is,
homomorphic equivalence and adding singletons to cores in addition to
pp-interpretations. For the semantic part we introduce a new construction,
called reflection, and for the syntactic part we find an appropriate weakening
of clone homomorphisms, called h1 clone homomorphisms (capturing identities of
height 1).
As a consequence, the complexity of the CSP of an at most countable
-categorical structure depends only on the identities of height 1
satisfied in its polymorphism clone as well as the the natural uniformity
thereon. This allows us in turn to formulate a new elegant dichotomy conjecture
for the CSPs of reducts of finitely bounded homogeneous structures.
Finally, we reveal a close connection between h1 clone homomorphisms and the
notion of compatibility with projections used in the study of the lattice of
interpretability types of varieties.Comment: 24 page
Absorbing Subalgebras, Cyclic Terms, and the Constraint Satisfaction Problem
The Algebraic Dichotomy Conjecture states that the Constraint Satisfaction
Problem over a fixed template is solvable in polynomial time if the algebra of
polymorphisms associated to the template lies in a Taylor variety, and is
NP-complete otherwise. This paper provides two new characterizations of
finitely generated Taylor varieties. The first characterization is using
absorbing subalgebras and the second one cyclic terms. These new conditions
allow us to reprove the conjecture of Bang-Jensen and Hell (proved by the
authors) and the characterization of locally finite Taylor varieties using weak
near-unanimity terms (proved by McKenzie and Mar\'oti) in an elementary and
self-contained way
Learning Parameterized Skills
We introduce a method for constructing skills capable of solving tasks drawn
from a distribution of parameterized reinforcement learning problems. The
method draws example tasks from a distribution of interest and uses the
corresponding learned policies to estimate the topology of the
lower-dimensional piecewise-smooth manifold on which the skill policies lie.
This manifold models how policy parameters change as task parameters vary. The
method identifies the number of charts that compose the manifold and then
applies non-linear regression in each chart to construct a parameterized skill
by predicting policy parameters from task parameters. We evaluate our method on
an underactuated simulated robotic arm tasked with learning to accurately throw
darts at a parameterized target location.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on
Machine Learning (ICML 2012
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