48 citations · 91 across the 8 of their papers we have counts for
9 papers
Interpreting systems as solving POMDPs: a step towards a formal understanding of agency
Martin Biehl, Nathaniel Virgo
Under what circumstances can a system be said to have beliefs and goals, and how do such agency-related features relate to its physical state? Recent work has proposed a notion of…
Interpreting Dynamical Systems as Bayesian Reasoners
Nathaniel Virgo, Martin Biehl, Simon McGregor
A central concept in active inference is that the internal states of a physical system parametrise probability measures over states of the external world. These can be seen as an a…
Information Decomposition based on Cooperative Game Theory
Nihat Ay, Daniel Polani, Nathaniel Virgo
We offer a new approach to the information decomposition problem in information theory: given a 'target' random variable co-distributed with multiple 'source' variables, how can we…
On the potential for open-endedness in neural networks
Nicholas Guttenberg, Nathaniel Virgo, Alexandra Penn
Natural evolution gives the impression of leading to an open-ended process of increasing diversity and complexity. If our goal is to produce such open-endedness artificially, this…
Being curious about the answers to questions: novelty search with learned attention
Nicholas Guttenberg, Martin Biehl, Nathaniel Virgo +1
We investigate the use of attentional neural network layers in order to learn a `behavior characterization' which can be used to drive novelty search and curiosity-based policies.…
Chemical Heredity as Group Selection at the Molecular Level
Omer Markovitch, Olaf Witkowski, Nathaniel Virgo
Many examples of cooperation exist in biology. In chemical systems however, which can sometimes be quite complex, we do not appear to observe intricate cooperative interactions. A…
Selection first path to the origin of life
Nicholas Guttenberg, Nathaniel Virgo, Chris Butch +1
We propose an alternative to the prevailing two origin of life narratives, one based on a replicator first hypothesis, and one based on a metabolism first hypothesis. Both hypothes…
Permutation-equivariant neural networks applied to dynamics prediction
Nicholas Guttenberg, Nathaniel Virgo, Olaf Witkowski +2
The introduction of convolutional layers greatly advanced the performance of neural networks on image tasks due to innately capturing a way of encoding and learning translation-inv…
Motility at the origin of life: Its characterization and a model
Tom Froese, Nathaniel Virgo, Takashi Ikegami
Due to recent advances in synthetic biology and artificial life, the origin of life is currently a hot topic of research. We review the literature and argue that the two traditiona…