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Timothy Muller

Publications and source records attributed to Timothy Muller.

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DiG-bench: Discovery in Games

Discovery---formulating novel generalizations---is a central part of the scientific process. Despite its importance, there is a gap in the current AI benchmark landscape, with few benchmarks directly probing the capacity for discovering new knowledge with experimentation in controlled environments where the objective is unknown. To address this gap, we release a new benchmark: DiG-bench (Discovery in Games). DiG-bench consists of a set of 70 independent games. Each game is encoded as a short string and has unique transformation rules that must be discovered through interaction and experimentation. The levels of the game present a series of challenges to test whether the rules have been discovered, where the win conditions for each level are also unknown. We provide games at seven tiers of difficulty for AI agents. The lowest tier is routinely solvable by multiple models, while the highest tier challenges the best models in agentic harnesses. All 70 games were solved by at least one human on first attempt. A subset of 21 games is released publicly, and the remainder is held private for secure evaluation.

cs.AI

Depression as a disorder of distributional coding

Major depressive disorder persistently stands as a major public health problem. While some progress has been made toward effective treatments, the neural mechanisms that give rise to the disorder remain poorly understood. In this Perspective, we put forward a new theory of the pathophysiology of depression. More precisely, we spotlight three previously separate bodies of research, showing how they can be fit together into a previously overlooked larger picture. The first piece of the puzzle is provided by pathophysiology research implicating dopamine in depression. The second piece, coming from computational psychiatry, links depression with a special form of reinforcement learning. The third and final piece involves recent work at the intersection of artificial intelligence and basic neuroscience research, indicating that the brain may represent value using a distributional code. Fitting these three pieces together yields a new model of depression's pathophysiology, which spans circuit, systems, computational and behavioral levels, opening up new directions for research.

q-bio.NC