When everyone looks too perfect to trust, weirdness becomes the most convincing sign you're real. If my dating app profile were made with A.I., my nose would be smaller, my teeth whiter. My eyes would be equally hooded, or not hooded at all, and my skin smoother. Men wouldn't make a game out of guessing whether I'm neurodivergent or Jewish. My gaze would be coquettish, my aura obvious, my entire essence ratcheted down a notch or several.

At the same time, the use of deep learning as the basis for neural decoding has received less widespread attention.

Understanding how humans perceive the likability of high-dimensional "objects"

Understanding how humans perceive the likability of high-dimensional "objects"

We thank the reviewers for their careful feedback. We will add this discussion to our paper since it is clearly an important point of the broader context.

As digital tools increasingly shape spatial planning practices, understanding how different data sources reflect human experiences of urban environments is essential. Street View Imagery (SVI) and Public Participation GIS (PPGIS) represent two prominent approaches for capturing place-based perceptions that can support urban planning decisions, yet their comparability remains underexplored. This study investigates the alignment between SVI-based perceived attractiveness and residents' reported experiences gathered via a city-wide PPGIS survey in Helsinki, Finland. Using participant-rated SVI data and semantic image segmentation, we trained a machine learning model to predict perceived attractiveness based on visual features. We compared these predictions to PPGIS-identified locations marked as attractive or unattractive, calculating agreement using two sets of strict and moderate criteria. Our findings reveal only partial alignment between the two datasets. While agreement (with a moderate threshold) reached 67% for attractive and 77% for unattractive places, agreement (with a strict threshold) dropped to 27% and 29%, respectively. By analysing a range of contextual variables, including noise, traffic, population presence, and land use, we found that non-visual cues significantly contributed to mismatches. The model failed to account for experiential dimensions such as activity levels and environmental stressors that shape perceptions but are not visible in images. These results suggest that while SVI offers a scalable and visual proxy for urban perception, it cannot fully substitute the experiential richness captured through PPGIS. We argue that both methods are valuable but serve different purposes; therefore, a more integrated approach is needed to holistically capture how people perceive urban environments.

Understanding the predictions made by deep learning models remains a central challenge, especially in high-stakes applications. A promising approach is to equip models with the ability to answer counterfactual questions -- hypothetical ``what if?'' scenarios that go beyond the observed data and provide insight into a model reasoning. In this work, we introduce the notion of causal interpretability, which formalizes when counterfactual queries can be evaluated from a specific class of models and observational data. We analyze two common model classes -- blackbox and concept-based predictors -- and show that neither is causally interpretable in general. To address this gap, we develop a framework for building models that are causally interpretable by design. Specifically, we derive a complete graphical criterion that determines whether a given model architecture supports a given counterfactual query. This leads to a fundamental tradeoff between causal interpretability and predictive accuracy, which we characterize by identifying the unique maximal set of features that yields an interpretable model with maximal predictive expressiveness. Experiments corroborate the theoretical findings.

Pairwise comparison methods, such as Fuzzy Preference Relations and Saaty's Multiplicative Preference Relations, are widely used to model expert judgments in multi-criteria decision-making. However, their application is limited by the high cognitive load required to complete $m(m-1)/2$ comparisons, the risk of inconsistency, and the computational complexity of deriving consistent value scales. This paper proposes the Tournament Tree Method (TTM), a novel elicitation and evaluation framework that overcomes these limitations. The TTM requires only $m-1$ pairwise comparisons to obtain a complete, reciprocal, and consistent comparison matrix. The method consists of three phases: (i) elicitation of expert judgments using a reduced set of targeted comparisons, (ii) construction of the consistent pairwise comparison matrix, and (iii) derivation of a global value scale from the resulting matrix. The proposed approach ensures consistency by design, minimizes cognitive effort, and reduces the dimensionality of preference modeling from $m(m-1)/2$ to $m$ parameters. Furthermore, it is compatible with the classical Deck of Cards method, and thus it can handle interval and ratio scales. We have also developed a web-based tool that demonstrates its practical applicability in real decision-making scenarios.

Swarm intelligence emerges from decentralised interactions among simple agents, enabling collective problem-solving. This study establishes a theoretical equivalence between pheromone-mediated aggregation in \celeg\ and reinforcement learning (RL), demonstrating how stigmergic signals function as distributed reward mechanisms. We model engineered nematode swarms performing foraging tasks, showing that pheromone dynamics mathematically mirror cross-learning updates, a fundamental RL algorithm. Experimental validation with data from literature confirms that our model accurately replicates empirical \celeg\ foraging patterns under static conditions. In dynamic environments, persistent pheromone trails create positive feedback loops that hinder adaptation by locking swarms into obsolete choices. Through computational experiments in multi-armed bandit scenarios, we reveal that introducing a minority of exploratory agents insensitive to pheromones restores collective plasticity, enabling rapid task switching. This behavioural heterogeneity balances exploration-exploitation trade-offs, implementing swarm-level extinction of outdated strategies. Our results demonstrate that stigmergic systems inherently encode distributed RL processes, where environmental signals act as external memory for collective credit assignment. By bridging synthetic biology with swarm robotics, this work advances programmable living systems capable of resilient decision-making in volatile environments.