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Zahra Sheikhbahaee

Alumni

Publications

World models, artificial general intelligence and the hard problems of life–mind continuity: toward a unified understanding of natural and artificial intelligence
Adam Safron
Michael Levin
Victoria Klimaj
Zahra Sheikhbahaee
Dalton Sakthivadivel
Adeel Razi
David Ha
Nick Hay
Kevin Schmidt
Irina Rish
David Krakauer
Melanie Mitchell
Samuel J. Gershman
Joshua B. Tenenbaum
Abstract This special issue examines how natural and artificial intelligences (AIs) model the world, and what this modelling reveals about c… (see more)ognition and relationships between life and mind. Rather than adopting a single definition, the collection considers how world models function and emerge in biological and artificial systems, exploring a diverse range of world modelling including causal, self-referential, individual goal-directed, collective and narrative forms. A recurring theme is the extent to which current AI systems trained on vast quantities of data learn the context-sensitive, temporally embedded, value-laden dimensions of world modelling that characterize diverse biological intelligences, or whether their impressive capabilities arise primarily from statistical surface regularities. The contributions also raise broader issues concerning embodiment, complexity, learning architectures and the social and scientific contexts in which world models operate. With this collection, we hope to clarify the conceptual landscape, identify key points of similarity and divergence between natural and artificial minds, and outline questions that may guide future research on the forms of world modelling that support grounded understanding, robust agency and potentially human-like general intelligence. This article is part of the theme issue ‘World models in natural and artificial intelligence’.
2026-05-13
Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences (published)
doi.org
Proceedings of 1st Workshop on Advancing Artificial Intelligence through Theory of Mind
Mouad Abrini
Omri Abend
Dina M. Acklin
Henny Admoni
Gregor Aichinger
Nitay Alon
Zahra Ashktorab
Ashish Atreja
Moises Auron
Alexander Aufreiter
Raghav Awasthi
Soumya Banerjee
Joseph Barnby
Rhea Basappa
Severin Bergsmann
Djallel Bouneffouf
Patrick Callaghan
Marc Cavazza
Thierry Chaminade
Sonia Chernova … (see 88 more)
Mohamed Chetouan
Moumita Choudhury
Axel Cleeremans
J. Cywinski
Fabio Cuzzolin
Hokin Deng
N'yoma Diamond
C. D. Pasquasio
Guillaume Dumas
Max J. van Duijn
Mahapatra Dwarikanath
Qingying Gao
Ashok Goel
Rebecca R. Goldstein
Matthew C. Gombolay
Gabriel Enrique Gonzalez
Amar Halilovic
Tobias Halmdienst
Mahimul Islam
Julian Jara-Ettinger
Natalie Kastel
Renana Keydar
Ashish K. Khanna
Mahdi Khoramshahi
Jihyun Kim
Mihyeon Kim
Youngbin Kim
Senka Krivic
Nikita Krasnytskyi
Arun Kumar
Junehyoung Kwon
EunJu Lee
Shane Lee
Peter R. Lewis 0001
Xue Li
Yijiang Li
Michal Lewandowski
Nathan Lloyd
Matthew B. Luebbers
Dezhi Luo
Haiyun Lyu
Dwarikanath Mahapatra
Kamal Maheshwari
Mallika Mainali
P. Mathur
Patrick Mederitsch
Shuwa Miura
Manuel Preston de Miranda
Reuth Mirsky
Shreya Mishra
Nina M. Moorman
Katelyn Morrison
John Muchovej
Bernhard Nessler
Felix Nessler
Hieu Minh Jord Nguyen
Abby Ortego
F. Papay
Antoine Pasquali
Hamed Rahimi
C. Raghu
Amanda L. Royka
Stefan Sarkadi
Jaelle Scheuerman
Simon Schmid
Paul Schrater
Anik Sen
Zahra Sheikhbahaee
Ke Shi
Reid G. Simmons
Nishant Singh
Mason O. Smith
Ramira van der Meulen
Anthia Solaki
Haoran Sun
Viktor Szolga
Matthew E. Taylor
Travis Taylor
Sanne van Waveren
Juan David Vargas
R. Verbrugge
Eitan Wagner
Justin D. Weisz
Ximing Wen
William Yeoh
Wenlong Zhang
Michelle Zhao
Shlomo Zilberstein
2025-04-27
ArXiv (preprint)
doi.org
arxiv.org
Learning Robust Representations for Transfer in Reinforcement Learning
Faisal Mohamed
Roger Creus Castanyer
Hongyao Tang
Zahra Sheikhbahaee
Glen Berseth
Learning transferable representations for deep reinforcement learning (RL) is a challenging problem due to the inherent non-stationarity, di… (see more)stribution shift, and unstable training dynamics. To be useful, a transferable representation needs to be robust to such factors. In this work, we introduce a new architecture and training strategy for learning robust representations for transfer learning in RL. We propose leveraging multiple CNN encoders and training them not to specialize in areas of the state space but instead to match each other's representation. We find that learned representations transfer well across many Atari tasks, resulting in better transfer learning performance and data efficiency than training from scratch.
2024-10-09
NeurIPS.cc/2024/Workshop/FITML (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
From physics to sentience: Deciphering the semantics of the free-energy principle and evaluating its claims: Comment on "Path integrals, particular kinds, and strange things" by Karl Friston et al.
Zahra Sheikhbahaee
Adam Safron
Casper Hesp
Guillaume Dumas
2023-11-30
Physics of Life Reviews (published)
doi.org
arxiv.org