Publications related to Autonomous virtual agents learning a cognitive model and evolving

In case of doubt, one follows one's self: the implicit guidance of the embodied self-avatar

Ronan Boulic, Bruno Herbelin, Loën Boban

The sense of embodiment in virtual reality (VR) is commonly understood as the subjective experience that one's physical body is substituted by a virtual counterpart, and is typically achieved when the avatar's body, seen from a first-person view, moves lik ...

2024

Generalization and Personalization of Machine Learning for Multimodal Mobile Sensing in Everyday Life

Lakmal Buddika Meegahapola

A range of behavioral and contextual factors, including eating and drinking behavior, mood, social context, and other daily activities, can significantly impact an individual's quality of life and overall well-being. Therefore, inferring everyday life aspe ...

EPFL2024

Ethological computational psychiatry: Challenges and opportunities

Mackenzie Mathis

Studying the intricacies of individual subjects' moods and cognitive processing over extended periods of time presents a formidable challenge in medicine. While much of systems neuroscience appropriately focuses on the link between neural circuit functions ...

Current Biology Ltd2024

Customizing the human-avatar mapping based on EEG error related potentials during avatar-based interaction

Ronan Boulic, Ricardo Andres Chavarriaga Lozano, Bruno Herbelin, José del Rocio Millán Ruiz, Olaf Blanke, Fumiaki Iwane, Thibault Serge Mario Porssut

Objective. A key challenge of virtual reality (VR) applications is to maintain a reliable human-avatar mapping. Users may lose the sense of controlling (sense of agency), owning (sense of body ownership), or being located (sense of self-location) inside th ...

2024

Optimization Algorithms for Decentralized, Distributed and Collaborative Machine Learning

Anastasiia Koloskova

Distributed learning is the key for enabling training of modern large-scale machine learning models, through parallelising the learning process. Collaborative learning is essential for learning from privacy-sensitive data that is distributed across various ...

EPFL2024

Social Opinion Formation and Decision Making Under Communication Trends

Ali H. Sayed, Virginia Bordignon, Mert Kayaalp

This work studies the learning process over social networks under partial and random information sharing. In traditional social learning models, agents exchange full belief information with each other while trying to infer the true state of nature. We stud ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2024

An immersive virtual reality tool for assessing left and right unilateral spatial neglect

Olaf Blanke, Andrea Serino, Roberta Ronchi

The reported rate of the occurrence of unilateral spatial neglect (USN) is highly variable likely due to the lack of validity and low sensitivity of classical tools used to assess it. Virtual reality (VR) assessments try to overcome these limitations by pr ...

Wiley2024

Neurobiological and metabolic basis of motivation and effort-based decision-making - A human 1H-MRS, fMRI and machine learning study

Arthur Barakat

Motivation is a multifaceted phenomenon that we explore within the framework of decision-making. Through this cognitive process, actions are directed towards specific goals by performing a trade-off between the cost and benefit of an action. The dorsomedia ...

EPFL2024

Stochastic pairwise preference convergence in Bayesian agents

Max-Olivier Hongler

Beliefs inform the behaviour of forward-thinking agents in complex environments. Recently, sequential Bayesian inference has emerged as a mechanism to study belief formation among agents adapting to dynamical conditions. However, we lack critical theory to ...

2024

Organ Neuroprosthetics: Connecting Transplanted and Artificial Organs with the Nervous System

Silvestro Micera

Implantable neural interfaces with the central and peripheral nervous systems are currently used to restore sensory, motor, and cognitive functions in disabled people with very promising results. They have also been used to modulate autonomic activities to ...

Wiley2024

Infusing structured knowledge priors in neural models for sample-efficient symbolic reasoning

Mattia Atzeni

The ability to reason, plan and solve highly abstract problems is a hallmark of human intelligence. Recent advancements in artificial intelligence, propelled by deep neural networks, have revolutionized disciplines like computer vision and natural language ...

EPFL2024

From finger animation to full-body embodiment of avatars with different morphologies and proportions

Mathias Guy Delahaye

VR (Virtual Reality) is a real-time simulation that creates the subjective illusion of being in a virtual world. This thesis explores how integrating the user's body and fingers can be achieved and beneficial for the user to experience VR. At the advent of ...

EPFL2023

Human-Robot Swarm Interaction: An Explorative Path to Foster Complex Systems Understanding

Hala Khodr

Order, regularities, and patterns are ubiquitous around us. A flock of birds maneuvering in the sky, the self-organization of social insects, a global pandemic or a traffic jam are examples of complex systems where the macroscopic patterns arise from the m ...

EPFL2023

Saliency prediction in 360° architectural scenes: Performance and impact of daylight variations

Marilyne Andersen, Sabine Süsstrunk, Kynthia Chamilothori, Bahar Aydemir, Caroline Karmann, Seungryong Kim

Saliency models are image-based prediction models that estimate human visual attention. Such models, when applied to architectural spaces, could pave the way for design decisions where visual attention is taken into account. In this study, we tested the pe ...

2023

Reinforcement learning approach to control an inverted pendulum: A general framework for educational purposes

Jesus Sanchez Rodriguez

Machine learning is often cited as a new paradigm in control theory, but is also often viewed as empirical and less intuitive for students than classical model-based methods. This is particularly the case for reinforcement learning, an approach that does n ...

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE2023

Playing Brains: The Ethical Challenges Posed by Silicon Sentience and Hybrid Intelligence in DishBrain

The convergence of human and artificial intelligence is currently receiving considerable scholarly attention. Much debate about the resulting Hybrid Minds focuses on the integration of artificial intelligence into the human brain through intelligent brain- ...

2023

Learning From Heterogeneous Data Based on Social Interactions Over Graphs

Ali H. Sayed, Stefan Vlaski, Virginia Bordignon

This work proposes a decentralized architecture, where individual agents aim at solving a classification problem while observing streaming features of different dimensions and arising from possibly different distributions. In the context of social learning ...

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC2023

Human Interactive Robotic Surfaces for Physical Immersion

Fabio Zuliani

Computers have long been augmenting human capabilities and communication, and with emerging technologies, physical immersion in virtual worlds is now attainable. These advancements push the boundaries of human potential, allowing designers, architects, eng ...

EPFL2023

Multi-agent Learning with Privacy Guarantees

Elsa Rizk

A multi-agent system consists of a collection of decision-making or learning agents subjected to streaming observations from some real-world phenomenon. The goal of the system is to solve some global learning or optimization problem in a distributed or dec ...

EPFL2023

Impact of Redundancy on Resilience in Distributed Optimization and Learning

Shuo Liu, Nirupam Gupta

This paper considers the problem of resilient distributed optimization and stochastic learning in a server-based architecture. The system comprises a server and multiple agents, where each agent has its own local cost function. The agents collaborate with ...

Assoc Computing Machinery2023