The ability to decompose scenes in terms of abstract building blocks is crucial for general intelligence. Where those basic building blocks share meaningful properties, interactions and other regularities across scenes, such decompositions can simplify reasoning and facilitate imagination of novel scenarios. In particular, representing perceptual observations in terms of entities should improve data efficiency and transfer performance on a wide range of tasks. Thus we need models capable of discovering useful decompositions of scenes by identifying units with such regularities and representing them in a common format. To address this problem, we have developed the Multi-Object Network (MONet). In this model, a VAE is trained end-to-end together with a recurrent attention network -in a purely unsupervised manner -to provide attention masks around, and reconstructions of, regions of images. We show that this model is capable of learning to decompose and represent challenging 3D scenes into semantically meaningful components, such as objects and background elements.

Working memory plays a key role in cognition, and yet its mechanisms remain much debated. Human performance on memory tasks is severely limited; however, the two major classes of theory explaining the limits leave open questions about key issues such as how multiple simultaneously-represented items can be distinguished. We propose a palimpsest model, with the occurrent activity of a single population of neurons coding for several multi-featured items. Using a probabilistic approach to storage and recall, we show how this model can account for many qualitative aspects of existing experimental data. In our account, the underlying nature of a memory item depends entirely on the characteristics of the population representation, and we provide analytical and numerical insights into critical issues such as multiplicity and binding. We consider representations in which information about individual feature values is partially separate from the information about binding that creates single items out of multiple features. An appropriate balance between these two types of information is required to capture fully the different types of error seen in human experimental data. Our model provides the first principled account of misbinding errors. We also suggest a specific set of stimuli designed to elucidate the representations that subjects actually employ.

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Abstract-We compare two well-known algorithms for locating odor sources in environments with a main wind flow. Their plume tracking performance is tested through systematic experiments with real robots in a wind tunnel under laminar flow condition. We present the system setup and show the wind and odor profiles. The results are then compared in terms of time and distance to reach the source, as well as speed in upwind direction. We conclude that the spiral-surge algorithm yields significantly better results than the casting algorithm, and discuss possible rationales behind this performance difference.