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Main Authors: Alonso, Albert, Kirkegaard, Julius B.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10531
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author Alonso, Albert
Kirkegaard, Julius B.
author_facet Alonso, Albert
Kirkegaard, Julius B.
contents We investigate the boundary between chemotaxis driven by spatial estimation of gradients and chemotaxis driven by temporal estimation. While it is well known that spatial chemotaxis becomes disadvantageous for small organisms at high noise levels, it is unclear whether there is a discontinuous switch of optimal strategies or a continuous transition exists. Here, we employ deep reinforcement learning to study the possible integration of spatial and temporal information in an a priori unconstrained manner. We parameterize such a combined chemotactic policy by a recurrent neural network and evaluate it using a minimal theoretical model of a chemotactic cell. By comparing with constrained variants of the policy, we show that it converges to purely temporal and spatial strategies at small and large cell sizes, respectively. We find that the transition between the regimes is continuous, with the combined strategy outperforming in the transition region both the constrained variants as well as models that explicitly integrate spatial and temporal information. Finally, by utilizing the attribution method of integrated gradients, we show that the policy relies on a non-trivial combination of spatially and temporally derived gradient information in a ratio that varies dynamically during the chemotactic trajectories.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2310_10531
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning optimal integration of spatial and temporal information in noisy chemotaxis
Alonso, Albert
Kirkegaard, Julius B.
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Machine Learning
Biological Physics
We investigate the boundary between chemotaxis driven by spatial estimation of gradients and chemotaxis driven by temporal estimation. While it is well known that spatial chemotaxis becomes disadvantageous for small organisms at high noise levels, it is unclear whether there is a discontinuous switch of optimal strategies or a continuous transition exists. Here, we employ deep reinforcement learning to study the possible integration of spatial and temporal information in an a priori unconstrained manner. We parameterize such a combined chemotactic policy by a recurrent neural network and evaluate it using a minimal theoretical model of a chemotactic cell. By comparing with constrained variants of the policy, we show that it converges to purely temporal and spatial strategies at small and large cell sizes, respectively. We find that the transition between the regimes is continuous, with the combined strategy outperforming in the transition region both the constrained variants as well as models that explicitly integrate spatial and temporal information. Finally, by utilizing the attribution method of integrated gradients, we show that the policy relies on a non-trivial combination of spatially and temporally derived gradient information in a ratio that varies dynamically during the chemotactic trajectories.
title Learning optimal integration of spatial and temporal information in noisy chemotaxis
topic Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Machine Learning
Biological Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10531