UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
             COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                            presents

     
	  "Formalising sensorimotor perception with
         dynamical symmetries and information theory"
	

                   Dr. Hippolyte Charvin
                (University of Hertfordshire)

                        13 May 2026
                         13:00 -14:00 
                          Room B160

                  Everyone is Welcome to Attend
		 Refreshments will be provided
				  
				                               

Abstract: 

Sensorimotor theories argue that perception is not based on only the processing of sensory input. Rather, perception would emerge from the structured way in which the agent's actions influence its sensory influx. In particular, both the "invariants" and the "structure of change" of how actions influence sensations have been proposed as foundational aspects of perception. Here, we explicitate these concepts by extending the class-pose decomposition framework. In this line of work, the aim is to decompose a group action into one coordinate (the "class") capturing the action's invariants, i.e., its orbits, and a second coordinate (the "pose") that is "strictly equivariant", in that it equivariantly tracks the changes induced by the group action without capturing any invariant. We extend this mathematical object in three directions: algebraic, dynamical and information-theoretic. This takes the formalism closer to the realistic modelling of embodied agents' closed-loop and stochastic behaviour, and identifies the information parsimony constraints that might induce these agents to capture class and pose variables. Along the way, we provide an information-theoretic characterisation of group actions' partition in orbits, which is an important step for formalising the links between symmetry and information.




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Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://cs-colloq.cs.herts.ac.uk