arXiv subjects

Peter David Fagan

Publications and source records attributed to Peter David Fagan.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Revisiting Classic Thought Experiments to Measure Consciousness for Artificial Intelligence Safety

This research note revisits Leibniz's mill, Turing's imitation game, and Searle's Chinese Room through the Conservation-Congruent Encoding (CCE) framework. It formalises a toy symbolic setting in which successful behaviour is measured by task performance ($W_{causal,T}$), while the efficiency with which preserved internal structure supports that behaviour is measured by operational consciousness ($\kappa_T$). Within this setup, an uncompressed lookup system and a compact generative system can in principle achieve comparable behavioural success, yet diverge sharply in $\kappa_T$: the former relies on an expanding standing store of unreused mappings, whereas the latter reuses compact internal structure. The note therefore reframes classic disputes about understanding by separating outward performance from the organisation that sustains it, and motivates why this distinction may matter for later AI-safety analysis.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Toward a Physical Theory of Intelligence

While often treated as abstract algorithmic properties, intelligence and computation are ultimately physical processes constrained by conservation laws. We introduce the Conservation-Congruent Encoding (CCE) framework as a unified, substrate-neutral physical framework for studying intelligence. We propose that information processing emerges when open systems undergo irreversible transitions, carving out macroscopic states from underlying reversible micro-dynamics. Generalizing Landauer's principle to arbitrary conserved quantities via metriplectic flows, we derive a universal bound for macroscopic computation. This yields physical metrics for intelligence and an operational analogue for consciousness, quantifying an agent's ability to extract work from the environment while minimizing its own dissipative dynamics. Applying CCE to the limits of physical observation, we model measurement as an active coarse-graining process rather than a passive projection. At the quantum scale, CCE recovers the Lindblad Master Equation, consistent with modelling decoherence as the dissipative exhaust required to record a measurement. Scaling to cosmological limits, we explore the hypothesis that gravity emerges as the macroscopic geometric footprint of these bounds. We show that, under this hypothesis, measurement-induced dissipation is consistent with a volumetric phase-space collapse, offering a dynamical route to the Bekenstein-Hawking area law. Equating the Landauer exhaust of this coarse-graining to horizon deformation outlines a limiting-case recovery of the Einstein Field Equations. Ultimately, by establishing a substrate-neutral link between thermodynamic dissipation, quantum measurement, and spacetime geometry, CCE provides physical constraints for understanding both natural and artificial intelligence.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Keyed Chaotic Dynamics for Privacy-Preserving Neural Inference

Neural network inference typically operates on raw input data, increasing the risk of exposure during preprocessing and inference. Moreover, neural architectures lack efficient built-in mechanisms for directly authenticating input data. This work introduces a novel encryption method for ensuring the security of neural inference. By constructing key-conditioned chaotic graph dynamical systems, we enable the encryption and decryption of real-valued tensors within the neural architecture. The proposed dynamical systems are particularly suited to encryption due to their sensitivity to initial conditions and their capacity to produce complex, key-dependent nonlinear transformations from compact rules. This work establishes a paradigm for securing neural inference and opens new avenues for research on the application of graph dynamical systems in neural network security.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2024

Learning from Demonstration with Implicit Nonlinear Dynamics Models

Learning from Demonstration (LfD) is a useful paradigm for training policies that solve tasks involving complex motions, such as those encountered in robotic manipulation. In practice, the successful application of LfD requires overcoming error accumulation during policy execution, i.e. the problem of drift due to errors compounding over time and the consequent out-of-distribution behaviours. Existing works seek to address this problem through scaling data collection, correcting policy errors with a human-in-the-loop, temporally ensembling policy predictions or through learning a dynamical system model with convergence guarantees. In this work, we propose and validate an alternative approach to overcoming this issue. Inspired by reservoir computing, we develop a recurrent neural network layer that includes a fixed nonlinear dynamical system with tunable dynamical properties for modelling temporal dynamics. We validate the efficacy of our neural network layer on the task of reproducing human handwriting motions using the LASA Human Handwriting Dataset. Through empirical experiments we demonstrate that incorporating our layer into existing neural network architectures addresses the issue of compounding errors in LfD. Furthermore, we perform a comparative evaluation against existing approaches including a temporal ensemble of policy predictions and an Echo State Network (ESN) implementation. We find that our approach yields greater policy precision and robustness on the handwriting task while also generalising to multiple dynamics regimes and maintaining competitive latency scores.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

SECURE: Semantics-aware Embodied Conversation under Unawareness for Lifelong Robot Learning

This paper addresses a challenging interactive task learning scenario we call rearrangement under unawareness: an agent must manipulate a rigid-body environment without knowing a key concept necessary for solving the task and must learn about it during deployment. For example, the user may ask to "put the two granny smith apples inside the basket", but the agent cannot correctly identify which objects in the environment are "granny smith" as the agent has not been exposed to such a concept before. We introduce SECURE, an interactive task learning policy designed to tackle such scenarios. The unique feature of SECURE is its ability to enable agents to engage in semantic analysis when processing embodied conversations and making decisions. Through embodied conversation, a SECURE agent adjusts its deficient domain model by engaging in dialogue to identify and learn about previously unforeseen possibilities. The SECURE agent learns from the user's embodied corrective feedback when mistakes are made and strategically engages in dialogue to uncover useful information about novel concepts relevant to the task. These capabilities enable the SECURE agent to generalize to new tasks with the acquired knowledge. We demonstrate in the simulated Blocksworld and the real-world apple manipulation environments that the SECURE agent, which solves such rearrangements under unawareness, is more data-efficient than agents that do not engage in embodied conversation or semantic analysis.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

DROID: A Large-Scale In-The-Wild Robot Manipulation Dataset

The creation of large, diverse, high-quality robot manipulation datasets is an important stepping stone on the path toward more capable and robust robotic manipulation policies. However, creating such datasets is challenging: collecting robot manipulation data in diverse environments poses logistical and safety challenges and requires substantial investments in hardware and human labour. As a result, even the most general robot manipulation policies today are mostly trained on data collected in a small number of environments with limited scene and task diversity. In this work, we introduce DROID (Distributed Robot Interaction Dataset), a diverse robot manipulation dataset with 76k demonstration trajectories or 350 hours of interaction data, collected across 564 scenes and 84 tasks by 50 data collectors in North America, Asia, and Europe over the course of 12 months. We demonstrate that training with DROID leads to policies with higher performance and improved generalization ability. We open source the full dataset, policy learning code, and a detailed guide for reproducing our robot hardware setup.

cs.RO↗