Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2611.07270

Satisficing as competitive Bayesian weighting: a minimal model of goal-directed choice under an unattained target

Moto Shinriki·Yu Kono·Tatsuji Takahashi
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Animals and humans often do not maximize; they act relative to goals (aspiration levels) that are frequently not yet met. How can a goal that is not (yet) realized organize choice? Deacon (2012) calls such absence-referenced organization \emph{ententional}, and García-Valdecasas and Deacon (2024) argue that ends are best understood as constraints rather than as particular states. We examine this idea in a minimal formal setting: Risk-sensitive Satisficing (RS), a bandit learning rule that values each action by its share of past trials multiplied by its surplus or shortfall relative to an aspiration level. We show that RS can be rewritten as a Bayesian-like estimator, Attention Competitive Bayes (ACB), in which the aspiration level is the prior mean of every action and the finite budget of trials sets how strongly evidence can override it. Two consequences follow. First, actions that are no longer sampled are partially overridden by the goal rather than by past observations: their estimates relax toward the aspiration level without any data being discarded. This ``pseudo-forgetting'' distinguishes ACB from models with an explicit forgetting rate. Second, when the aspiration is unattainable, exploration does not settle; in Bernoulli bandit simulations, adjusting the aspiration level from evidence reduced regret (expected loss). ACB offers an analyzable model in which an unattained goal and a limited attentional resource jointly constrain behavior, and it yields testable predictions about how organisms revalue options they have abandoned.

Explore related subjects

cs.LGcs.AIstat.ML

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Moto Shinriki, Yu Kono, Tatsuji Takahashi. 2026-11-05. Satisficing as competitive Bayesian weighting: a minimal model of goal-directed choice under an unattained target. https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07270

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

B-XAIC Dataset: Benchmarking Explainable AI for Graph Neural Networks Using Chemical Data

Understanding the reasoning behind deep learning model predictions is crucial in cheminformatics and drug discovery, where molecular design determines their properties. However, current evaluation frameworks for Explainable AI (XAI) in this domain often rely on artificial datasets or simplified tasks, employing data-derived metrics that fail to capture the complexity of real-world scenarios and lack a direct link to explanation faithfulness. To address this, we introduce B-XAIC, a novel benchmark constructed from real-world molecular data and diverse tasks with known ground-truth rationales for assigned labels. Through a comprehensive evaluation using B-XAIC, we reveal limitations of existing XAI methods for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in the molecular domain. This benchmark provides a valuable resource for gaining deeper insights into the faithfulness of XAI, facilitating the development of more reliable and interpretable models.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

Machine Learning Algorithms for Improving Black Box Optimization Solvers

Black-box optimization (BBO) addresses problems where objectives are accessible only through costly queries without gradients or explicit structure. Classical derivative-free methods---line search, direct search, and model-based solvers such as Bayesian optimization---form the backbone of BBO, yet often struggle in high-dimensional, noisy, or mixed-integer settings. Recent advances use machine learning (ML) and reinforcement learning (RL) to enhance BBO: ML provides expressive surrogates, adaptive updates, meta-learning-based algorithm selection, and generative models, while the RL--BBO interface includes dynamic operator configuration, robust policy search, and meta-optimization across tasks. This paper surveys these developments, covering representative algorithms such as the modular model-based optimization framework (mlrMBO), zeroth-order adaptive momentum methods (ZO-AdaMM), automated BBO (ABBO), distributed block-wise optimization (DiBB), partition-based Bayesian optimization (SPBOpt), the transformer-based optimizer (B2Opt), diffusion-model-based BBO, surrogate-assisted RL for differential evolution (Surr-RLDE), robust BBO (RBO), coordinate-ascent MORE with step size adaptation (CAS-MORE), log-barrier stochastic gradient descent (LB-SGD), policy improvement with black-box (PIBB), and offline Q-learning with Mamba backbones (Q-Mamba). We further review benchmark efforts such as the NeurIPS 2020 BBO Challenge and the MetaBox framework. A controlled numerical study further confirms that ML-based candidate screening can improve the evaluation-budget performance of direct search and differential evolution, while the benefit remains solver-dependent.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

HomID : Benchmarking Intrinsic Dimension Estimators on Homogenous Manifolds with Anisotropic Embeddings

The manifold hypothesis suggests that data lies on manifolds with smaller intrinsic dimension (ID) than their ambient dimension. However there is no empirical agreement on the estimates for ID from different estimators for realistic datasets. Thus it is important to test ID estimators (IDEs) with targeted stressors. In this work, we consider the role of anisotropy. To this end, we propose HomID, a collection of homogeneous spaces with anisotropic embedding, for benchmarking ID estimators. We observe that methods that perform well on standard benchmarks systematically degrade on HomID under identical resource allocation. We further observe that anisotropic distortion of such benchmarks also results in performance degradation. Finally, we demonstrate that controlled anisotropic distortions induce systematic shifts in the distributions on which these methods rely, providing a concrete mechanism for the resulting estimation errors in two particular IDEs. The code for the project is available at https://github.com/a-writes-code/homid

cs.LG↗