Adaptation to criticality through organizational invariance in embodied agents

Many biological and cognitive systems do not operate deep within one or other regime of activity. Instead, they are poised at critical points located at phase transitions in their parameter space. The pervasiveness of criticality suggests that there may be general principles inducing this behaviour, yet there is no well-founded theory for understanding how criticality is generated at a wide span of levels and contexts. In order to explore how criticality might emerge from general adaptive mechanisms, we propose a simple learning rule that maintains an internal organizational structure from a specific family of systems at criticality. We implement the mechanism in artificial embodied agents controlled by a neural network maintaining a correlation structure randomly sampled from an Ising model at critical temperature. Agents are evaluated in two classical reinforcement learning scenarios: the Mountain Car and the Acrobot double pendulum. In both cases the neural controller appears to reach a point of criticality, which coincides with a transition point between two regimes of the agent's behaviour. These results suggest that adaptation to criticality could be used as a general adaptive mechanism in some circumstances, providing an alternative explanation for the pervasive presence of criticality in biological and cognitive systems.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1704.0525

QCD×\timesQED evolution of TMDs

We consider for the first time the QED corrections to the evolution of (un)polarized quark and gluon transverse-momentum-dependent distribution and fragmentation functions (TMDs in general). By extending their operator definition to QCD$\times$QED, we provide the mixed new anomalous dimensions up to ${\cal O}(\alpha_s\alpha)$ and the pure QED ones up to ${\cal O}(\alpha^2)$. These new corrections are universal for all TMDs up to the flavor of the considered parton, i.e., the full flavor universality of TMD evolution found in pure QCD is broken in QCD$\times$QED by the presence of the electric charge. In addition, we provide the leading-order QED corrections to the matching coefficients of the unpolarized quark TMD parton distribution function onto its integrated counterparts at ${\cal O}(\alpha_s^0\alpha)$.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures. v2: minor corrections, accepted for publication in Phys. Lett.

Soft and Collinear Factorization and Transverse Momentum Dependent Parton Distribution Functions

In this work we consider how a parton distribution function, with an explicit transverse momentum dependence can be properly defined in a regularization-scheme independent manner. We argue that by considering a factorized form of the transverse momentum dependent spectrum for the production of a heavy lepton pair in Drell-Yan reaction, one should first split the relevant soft function into two boost invariant contributions. When those soft contributions are added to the pure collinear contributions, well-defined hadronic matrix elements emerge, i.e., the transverse momentum dependent distributions. We also perform a comparison with Collins' definition.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures. We modified the discussion about the equivalence between Collins (JCC) and Echevarria-Idilbi-Scimemi (EIS) definitions of TMDPDF. The results remain intact. Version to appear in Phys. Lett.