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Principles and Algorithms for Self-Motivated Behaviour
Naftali Tishby

Fri Dec 09 02:00 AM -- 02:30 AM (PST) @
in Imperfect Decision Makers: Admitting Real-World Rationality »

For planning with high uncertainty, or with too many possible end positions as in games like Go or even chess, one can almost never solve the optimal control problem and must use some receding horizon heuristics. One such heuristics is based on the idea of maximizing empowerment, namely, keep the number of possible options maximal. This has been formulated using information theoretic ideas as maximizing the information capacity between the sequence of actions and the possible state of the system at some finite horizon, but no efficient algorithm for calculating this capacity was suggested. In this work we propose a concrete and efficient way for calculating the capacity between a sequence of actions and future states, based on local linearization of the dynamics and Gaussian channel capacity calculation. I will describe the new algorithm and some of its interesting implications.

Author Information

Naftali Tishby (The Hebrew University Jerusalem)

Naftali Tishby, is a professor of computer science and the director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Neural Computation (ICNC) at the Hebrew university of Jerusalem. He received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the Hebrew University and was a research staff member at MIT and Bell Labs from 1985 to 1991. He was also a visiting professor at Princeton NECI, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California at Santa Barbara. Dr. Tishby is a leader of machine learning research and computational neuroscience. He was among the first to introduce methods from statistical physics into learning theory, and dynamical systems techniques in speech processing. His current research is at the interface between computer science, statistical physics and computational neuroscience and concerns the foundations of biological information processing and the connections between dynamics and information.

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