Given one feature of a novel animal, humans readily make inferences about other features of the animal. For example, winged creatures often fly, and creatures that eat fish often live in the water. We explore the knowledge that supports these inferences and compare two approaches. The first approach proposes that humans rely on abstract representations of dependency relationships between features, and is formalized here as a graphical model. The second approach proposes that humans rely on specific knowledge of previously encountered animals, and is formalized here as a family of exemplar models.

This work introduces Divide-Factor-Combine (DFC), a parallel divide-andconquer framework for noisy matrix factorization.

Storing a new pattern in a palimpsest memory system comes at the cost of interfering with the memory traces of previously stored items. Knowing the age of a pattern thus becomes critical for recalling it faithfully. This implies that there should be a tight coupling between estimates of age, as a form of familiarity, and the neural dynamics of recollection, something which current theories omit. Using a normative model of autoassociative memory, we show that a dual memory system, consisting of two interacting modules for familiarity and recollection, has best performance for both recollection and recognition. This finding provides a new window onto actively contentious psychological and neural aspects of recognition memory.

In this work we use Branch-and-Bound (BB) to efficiently detect objects with deformable part models. Instead of evaluating the classifier score exhaustively over image locations and scales, we use BB to focus on promising image locations. The core problem is to compute bounds that accommodate part deformations; for this we adapt the Dual Trees data structure [7] to our problem. We evaluate our approach using Mixture-of-Deformable Part Models [4]. We obtain exactly the same results but are 10-20 times faster on average. We also develop a multiple-object detection variation of the system, where hypotheses for 20 categories are inserted in a common priority queue.

Probabilistic planning captures the uncertainty of plan execution by probabilistically modeling the effects of actions in the environment, and therefore the probability of reaching different states from a given state and action. In order to compute a solution for a probabilistic planning problem, planners need to manage the uncertainty associated with the different paths from the initial state to a goal state. Several approaches to manage uncertainty were proposed, e.g., consider all paths at once, perform determinization of actions, and sampling. In this paper, we introduce trajectory-based short-sighted Stochastic Shortest Path Problems (SSPs), a novel approach to manage uncertainty for probabilistic planning problems in which states reachable with low probability are substituted by artificial goals that heuristically estimate their cost to reach a goal state. We also extend the theoretical results of Short-Sighted Probabilistic Planner (SSiPP) [1] by proving that SSiPP always finishes and is asymptotically optimal under sufficient conditions on the structure of short-sighted SSPs. We empirically compare SSiPP using trajectorybased short-sighted SSPs with the winners of the previous probabilistic planning competitions and other state-of-the-art planners in the triangle tireworld problems.

Recent work has shown this estimator to have strong statistical guarantees in recovering the true structure of the sparse inverse covariance matrix, or alternatively the underlying graph structure of the corresponding Gaussian Markov Random Field, even in very high-dimensional regimes with a limited number of samples. In this paper, we are concerned with the computational cost in solving the above optimization problem. Our proposed algorithm partitions the problem into smaller sub-problems, and uses the solutions of the sub-problems to build a good approximation for the original problem. Our key idea for the divide step to obtain a sub-problem partition is as follows: we first derive a tractable bound on the quality of the approximate solution obtained from solving the corresponding sub-divided problems. Based on this bound, we propose a clustering algorithm that attempts to minimize this bound, in order to find effective partitions of the variables. For the conquer step, we use the approximate solution, i.e., solution resulting from solving the sub-problems, as an initial point to solve the original problem, and thereby achieve a much faster computational procedure.

Recent advances in associative memory design through structured pattern sets and graph-based inference algorithms allow reliable learning and recall of exponential numbers of patterns. Though these designs correct external errors in recall, they assume neurons compute noiselessly, in contrast to highly variable neurons in hippocampus and olfactory cortex. Here we consider associative memories with noisy internal computations and analytically characterize performance. As long as internal noise is less than a specified threshold, error probability in the recall phase can be made exceedingly small. More surprisingly, we show internal noise actually improves performance of the recall phase. Computational experiments lend additional support to our theoretical analysis. This work suggests a functional benefit to noisy neurons in biological neuronal networks.

We focus on the self-supervised discovery of manipulation concepts that can be adapted and reassembled to address various robotic tasks. We propose that the decision to conceptualize a physical procedure should not depend on how we name it (semantics) but rather on the significance of the informativeness in its representation regarding the low-level physical state and state changes. We model manipulation concepts (discrete symbols) as generative and discriminative goals and derive metrics that can autonomously link them to meaningful sub-trajectories from noisy, unlabeled demonstrations. Specifically, we employ a trainable codebook containing encodings (concepts) capable of synthesizing the end-state of a sub-trajectory given the current state (generative informativeness). Moreover, the encoding corresponding to a particular sub-trajectory should differentiate the state within and outside it and confidently predict the subsequent action based on the gradient of its discriminative score (discriminative informativeness). These metrics, which do not rely on human annotation, can be seamlessly integrated into a VQ-VAE framework, enabling the partitioning of demonstrations into semantically consistent sub-trajectories, fulfilling the purpose of discovering manipulation concepts and the corresponding sub-goal (key) states. We evaluate the effectiveness of the learned concepts by training policies that utilize them as guidance, demonstrating superior performance compared to other baselines. Additionally, our discovered manipulation concepts compare favorably to human-annotated ones while saving much manual effort.

It has long been recognised that statistical dependencies in neuronal activity need to be taken into account when decoding stimuli encoded in a neural population. Less studied, though equally pernicious, is the need to take account of dependencies between synaptic weights when decoding patterns previously encoded in an auto-associative memory. We show that activity-dependent learning generically produces such correlations, and failing to take them into account in the dynamics of memory retrieval leads to catastrophically poor recall. We derive optimal network dynamics for recall in the face of synaptic correlations caused by a range of synaptic plasticity rules. These dynamics involve well-studied circuit motifs, such as forms of feedback inhibition and experimentally observed dendritic nonlinearities. We therefore show how addressing the problem of synaptic correlations leads to a novel functional account of key biophysical features of the neural substrate.