This time, celebrating 19 days of being “on hold” on arXiv! “A Braitenberg vehicle’s habitat”, w/ @frosas.bsky.social and Filippo Torresan. Accepted at ALIFE 2026. What part of the environment constitutes an agent’s effective world, its habitat? 1/

New work led by Filippo out on Neurocomputing! W/ @ksks.bsky.social , @kanair.bsky.social and me. Does an agent need to be "aware" of its executed actions to learn to achieve a certain goal? In reinforcement learning, the answer is generally "yes". 1/

New preprint w/ @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social: Bayesian updates from coalgebraic determinisation. We show a relation between Bayesian filtering updates and some classical automata theory constructions. The results are a bit technical, so I'll focus on some applications below. 1/

Celebrating 36 days of being kept "on hold" on arXiv! Paper: manuelbaltieri.com/assets/pdf/W... World models are a pretty hot topic right now, but what is a world model? Joint work w/ Filippo, @yivannaviy, Alec, and @_fernando_rosas 1/

Our work on compositional behavioural semantics for state abstraction was accepted at ICML! Link: arxiv.org/abs/2606.25357 State abstraction compresses an RL state space while trying to retain decision-relevant behaviour. What survives? 1/

Compositional Behavioral Semantics for State Abstraction in Reinforcement Learning

State abstraction plays a key role in scaling reinforcement learning to complex but structured systems. In studying such systems, a wide range of behavioral structures have been studied in reinforceme...

arxiv.org

My comment on Fillipo Torresan & @manuelbaltieri.bsky.social's "Disentangled representations for causal cognition" in Physics of Life Reviews: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... I argue that there is little meaningful analogy between learning from "pixels" vs "experience," but I praise

Disanalogies between causal learning in animals vs. machines: Comment on “disentangled representations for causal cognition” by F. Torresan & M. Baltieri

None.

sciencedirect.com

Shocking

Manlio De Domenico@manlius.bsky.social · last yr.

So, your favorite/fancy/rich AI provider most likely cheats most of the time to score high in LLMs leaderboards. Shocking, but totally expected, isn't it? arxiv.org/abs/2504.20879 Where are the AGI Bros? 👌 #AI #LLM

Igor, you legend. Don't stop being you. There are ten more of these unreadable hypercube diagrams on the following pages.... Souce: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00682

My experience applying for retractions at Elsevier. I've looked at paper mills since 2019 and drafted a preprint on a paper mill from an international publisher in 2021. I started contacting journals or research integrity teams to raise concerns about papers. Publishers react differently. 1/n

Great talk by @manuelbaltieri.bsky.social!

Johannes Kleiner@johanneskleiner.bsky.social · last yr.

Great start of the Breakthrough Discuss Conference! Here Sonia Contera is kicking off the conference. Great discussions yesterday night with @ronyhirsch.bsky.social, @lenoreblum.bsky.social, and many others. Even Roger Penrose was kind enough to indulge us 🤗 Looking forward to the lectures!

"We discuss the problem of running today’s software decades, centuries, or even millennia into the future" tinlizzie.org/VPRIPapers/t...

Preprint time: “AI in a vat: Fundamental limits of efficient world modelling for agent sandboxing and interpretability” arxiv.org/abs/2504.04608 Exploring the fundamental limits that shape the design space of world modelling for agent sandboxing and interpretability

AI in a vat: Fundamental limits of efficient world modelling for agent sandboxing and interpretability

Recent work proposes using world models to generate controlled virtual environments in which AI agents can be tested before deployment to ensure their reliability and safety. However, accurate world m...

arxiv.org

GOL in GOL in HOL: Verified circuits in Conway's game of life. ~ Magnus O. Myreen, Mario Carneiro. arxiv.org/abs/2504.00263 #ITP #HOL4

GOL in GOL in HOL: Verified Circuits in Conway's Game of Life

Conway's Game of Life (GOL) is a cellular automaton that has captured the interest of hobbyists and mathematicians alike for more than 50 years. The Game of Life is Turing complete, and people have be...

arxiv.org

Great to see a colleague speaking up, sad to think about the state of affairs.

I don't want to delete anything. I simply agree with Barbieri's distinction and claim that for a successful syntactic relationship, there is no need for anticipation or computation. On that level, the cell is a simple reliable #state machine (transducer) with no place for interpretation of meaning.

One of the most controversial corollaries of relational biology is the impossibility of simulating life. But what if I tell you that this claim is simply the result of misinterpreting Robert Rosen's ideas? #complexitycat 🐈‍⬛👇🧵1/3 amahury.github.io/posts/trilog...

Re the Tononi paper: Both Tononi’s IIT (phi) and Friston’s FEP start from fundamental, axiomatic, and debatable assumptions. These assumptions are generally made without any humility. This logic allows them to make exceptionally broad claims. Which contributes to my unease about them.

Directed wiring diagrams for Mealy machines!

arxiv math.CT@arxiv-math-ct.bsky.social · last yr.

Keri D'Angelo, Sophie Libkind Dependent Directed Wiring Diagrams for Composing Instantaneous Systems https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05457

Only just learning about this now -- I guess for a while people have predicted that the AI doomer rationalist crowd would go violent, so its not surprising in some sense. Still though, odd times! www.theguardian.com/global/ng-in...

They wanted to save us from a dark AI future. Then six people were killed

How a group of Silicon Valley math prodigies, AI researchers and internet burnouts descended into an alleged violent cult

theguardian.com

After a multi-year collaboration with Martin Biehl, @mattecapu.bsky.social and @nathanielvirgo.bsky.social, I’m stoked to share the first of (hopefully) many outputs: “A Bayesian Interpretation of the Internal Model Principle” arxiv.org/abs/2503.00511. 1/

A Bayesian Interpretation of the Internal Model Principle

The internal model principle, originally proposed in the theory of control of linear systems, nowadays represents a more general class of results in control theory and cybernetics. The central claim o...

arxiv.org

arXiv math.OC Optimization and Control@mathoc-bot.bsky.social · last yr.

Manuel Baltieri, Martin Biehl, Matteo Capucci, Nathaniel Virgo: A Bayesian Interpretation of the Internal Model Principle https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00511 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.00511 https://arxiv.org/html/2503.00511

This looks fantastic, and goes to the must read pile for 2025

arxiv math.DS@arxiv-math-ds.bsky.social · last yr.

Aaron D. Ames, Joe Moeller, Paulo Tabuada Categorical Lyapunov Theory I: Stability of Flows https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.15276

This looks really interesting!

arXiv math.CT Category Theory@mathct-bot.bsky.social · last yr.

Matthew Pugh, Jo Grundy, Corina Cirstea, Nick Harris: Learning Is a Kan Extension https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13810 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.13810 https://arxiv.org/html/2502.13810

Elon Musk is making wild claims that #DOGE has found evidence of massive Social Security fraud.... The reality is that Musk's young engineers don't seem to be able to understand COBOL databases while Musk is misrepresenting the Social Security data www.wired.com/story/elon-m...

No, 150-Year-Olds Aren't Collecting Social Security Benefits

Elon Musk claims to have found rampant fraud in the Social Security Administration. There's a much simpler explanation.

wired.com

More on process theories arxiv.org/abs/2502.10368

Generalised Process Theories

Process theories provide a powerful framework for describing compositional structures across diverse fields, from quantum mechanics to computational linguistics. Traditionally, they have been formaliz...

arxiv.org

Generalising Laplacians in a categorical setup

arxiv math.CT@arxiv-math-ct.bsky.social · 2y ago

Robert Ghrist, Miguel Lopez, Paige Randall North, Hans Riess Categorical Diffusion of Weighted Lattices https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.03890

Too many things to read already for this year arxiv.org/abs/2404.14423

A Mereological Approach to Higher-Order Structure in Complex Systems: from Macro to Micro with Möbius

Relating microscopic interactions to macroscopic observables is a central challenge in the study of complex systems. Addressing this question requires understanding both pairwise and higher-order inte...

arxiv.org

Review of "Haskell in depth" by Vitaly Bragilevsky. ~ Brent Yorgey. www.cambridge.org/core/service... #Haskell #FunctionalProgramming

This review paper by @guillaume-garrigos.com on SGD-related algorithms is a fantastic resource, offering elegant, self-contained, and concise proofs in a single, accessible reference. arxiv.org/pdf/2301.11235

2025 already clearly not disappointing for categorical systems theory arxiv.org/abs/2410.10627

Effectful Mealy Machines: Bisimulation and Trace

We introduce effectful Mealy machines - a general notion of Mealy machine with global effects - and give them semantics in terms of both bisimilarity and traces. Bisimilarity of effectful Mealy machin...

arxiv.org