Pith Number

pith:W35LIN2S

pith:2026:W35LIN2S3RC4V4VLOIIVC3UJAV

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Clock-state olfactory search in turbulent flows using Q-learning: The geometry of plume recovery

Agnese Seminara, Marco Rando, Robin A. Heinonen, Yujia Qi

A running clock since the last odor whiff lets a Q-learning agent learn surging, casting and downwind return to recover plumes in turbulence.

arxiv:2605.15938 v1 · 2026-05-15 · physics.bio-ph · cs.LG

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Claims

C1strongest claim

The agent learns an interpretable strategy to recover the plume which combines well-known behaviors observed in insects: surging, casting, and a return downwind. While achieving good performance on data from direct numerical simulations of turbulence, the agent is limited by an inability to adapt its strategy to the local intermittency level; we show that providing more flexibility improves robustness.

C2weakest assumption

That a single running clock since the last whiff supplies enough state information for tabular Q-learning to converge on a robust recovery policy across varying turbulence intermittency levels.

C3one line summary

A tabular Q-learning agent with clock-state memory learns surging, casting, and downwind return to recover odor plumes in turbulent flows from direct numerical simulations.

References

46 extracted · 46 resolved · 0 Pith anchors

[1] Elementary sensory-motor transfor- mations underlying olfactory navigation in walking fruit- flies.Elife, 7:e37815, 2018 2018

[2] T. C. Baker. Upwind flight and casting flight: com- plementary and tonic systems used for location of sex pheromone sources by male moths.Proc. 10 th Intl Sym- posium on Olfaction and Taste, 13:18, 19 1990

[3] Manoeuvres used by flying male oriental fruit moths to relocate a sex pheromone plume in an experimentally shifted wind-field 1987

[4] Olfactory search at high Reynolds number.Proceedings of the na- tional academy of sciences, 99(20):12589–12593, 2002 2002

[5] W. J. Bell and E. Kramer. Search and anemotaxis in insects.J. Insect Physiol, 25:631–640, 1979 1979

Cited by

1 paper in Pith

Smart strategies to navigate turbulent odor plumes reorienting to local wind

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-20T00:01:45.827183Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

b6fab43752dc45caf2ab7211516e89055f5f55103f1c0f829a874d8db1ccff45

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.15938 · arxiv_version: 2605.15938v1 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.15938 · pith_short_12: W35LIN2S3RC4 · pith_short_16: W35LIN2S3RC4V4VL · pith_short_8: W35LIN2S

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/W35LIN2S3RC4V4VLOIIVC3UJAV \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: b6fab43752dc45caf2ab7211516e89055f5f55103f1c0f829a874d8db1ccff45

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "2c7b0f93b650d6ae195254120b6960ba7672ef726c1cdc8dbebf701b904ef135",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [
      "cs.LG"
    ],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "physics.bio-ph",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-15T13:19:26Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "a471c6d221b3f865599833e585ad0c893b127f8011ae63939b9e40f90ebe0af0"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.15938",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 1
  }
}