Cargando…

Emergence of common concepts, symmetries and conformity in agent groups—an information-theoretic model

The paper studies principles behind structured, especially symmetric, representations through enforced inter-agent conformity. For this, we consider agents in a simple environment who extract individual representations of this environment through an information maximization principle. The representa...

Descripción completa

Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Möller, Marco, Polani, Daniel
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: The Royal Society 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10102731/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37065261
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2023.0006
_version_ 1785025749068021760
author Möller, Marco
Polani, Daniel
author_facet Möller, Marco
Polani, Daniel
author_sort Möller, Marco
collection PubMed
description The paper studies principles behind structured, especially symmetric, representations through enforced inter-agent conformity. For this, we consider agents in a simple environment who extract individual representations of this environment through an information maximization principle. The representations obtained by different agents differ in general to some extent from each other. This gives rise to ambiguities in how the environment is represented by the different agents. Using a variant of the information bottleneck principle, we extract a ‘common conceptualization’ of the world for this group of agents. It turns out that the common conceptualization appears to capture much higher regularities or symmetries of the environment than the individual representations. We further formalize the notion of identifying symmetries in the environment both with respect to ‘extrinsic’ (birds-eye) operations on the environment as well as with respect to ‘intrinsic’ operations, i.e. subjective operations corresponding to the reconfiguration of the agent’s embodiment. Remarkably, using the latter formalism, one can re-wire an agent to conform to the highly symmetric common conceptualization to a much higher degree than an unrefined agent; and that, without having to re-optimize the agent from scratch. In other words, one can ‘re-educate’ an agent to conform to the de-individualized ‘concept’ of the agent group with comparatively little effort.
format Online
Article
Text
id pubmed-10102731
institution National Center for Biotechnology Information
language English
publishDate 2023
publisher The Royal Society
record_format MEDLINE/PubMed
spelling pubmed-101027312023-04-15 Emergence of common concepts, symmetries and conformity in agent groups—an information-theoretic model Möller, Marco Polani, Daniel Interface Focus Articles The paper studies principles behind structured, especially symmetric, representations through enforced inter-agent conformity. For this, we consider agents in a simple environment who extract individual representations of this environment through an information maximization principle. The representations obtained by different agents differ in general to some extent from each other. This gives rise to ambiguities in how the environment is represented by the different agents. Using a variant of the information bottleneck principle, we extract a ‘common conceptualization’ of the world for this group of agents. It turns out that the common conceptualization appears to capture much higher regularities or symmetries of the environment than the individual representations. We further formalize the notion of identifying symmetries in the environment both with respect to ‘extrinsic’ (birds-eye) operations on the environment as well as with respect to ‘intrinsic’ operations, i.e. subjective operations corresponding to the reconfiguration of the agent’s embodiment. Remarkably, using the latter formalism, one can re-wire an agent to conform to the highly symmetric common conceptualization to a much higher degree than an unrefined agent; and that, without having to re-optimize the agent from scratch. In other words, one can ‘re-educate’ an agent to conform to the de-individualized ‘concept’ of the agent group with comparatively little effort. The Royal Society 2023-04-14 /pmc/articles/PMC10102731/ /pubmed/37065261 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2023.0006 Text en © 2023 The Authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Articles
Möller, Marco
Polani, Daniel
Emergence of common concepts, symmetries and conformity in agent groups—an information-theoretic model
title Emergence of common concepts, symmetries and conformity in agent groups—an information-theoretic model
title_full Emergence of common concepts, symmetries and conformity in agent groups—an information-theoretic model
title_fullStr Emergence of common concepts, symmetries and conformity in agent groups—an information-theoretic model
title_full_unstemmed Emergence of common concepts, symmetries and conformity in agent groups—an information-theoretic model
title_short Emergence of common concepts, symmetries and conformity in agent groups—an information-theoretic model
title_sort emergence of common concepts, symmetries and conformity in agent groups—an information-theoretic model
topic Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10102731/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37065261
http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2023.0006
work_keys_str_mv AT mollermarco emergenceofcommonconceptssymmetriesandconformityinagentgroupsaninformationtheoreticmodel
AT polanidaniel emergenceofcommonconceptssymmetriesandconformityinagentgroupsaninformationtheoreticmodel