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Related papers: A Minimal Active Inference Agent

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Automated decision-making under uncertainty requires balancing exploitation and exploration. Classical methods treat these separately using heuristics, while Active Inference unifies them through Expected Free Energy (EFE) minimization.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Wouter W. L. Nuijten , Mykola Lukashchuk

To date, formal models of collective intelligence have lacked a plausible mathematical description of the relationship between local-scale interactions between highly autonomous sub-system components (individuals) and global-scale behavior…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2021-07-21 Rafael Kaufmann , Pranav Gupta , Jacob Taylor

Active Inference is a theory of action arising from neuroscience which casts action and planning as a bayesian inference problem to be solved by minimizing a single quantity - the variational free energy. Active Inference promises a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-10 Beren Millidge

Autonomous robotic navigation in real-world environments requires exploration to acquire environmental information as well as goal-directed navigation in order to reach specified targets. Active inference (AIF) based on the free-energy…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Riko Yokozawa , Kentaro Fujii , Yuta Nomura , Shingo Murata

Active inference is a probabilistic framework for modelling the behaviour of biological and artificial agents, which derives from the principle of minimising free energy. In recent years, this framework has successfully been applied to a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-07-13 Lancelot Da Costa , Noor Sajid , Thomas Parr , Karl Friston , Ryan Smith

Inspired by the concept of active learning, we propose active inference$\unicode{x2013}$a methodology for statistical inference with machine-learning-assisted data collection. Assuming a budget on the number of labels that can be collected,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-04-09 Tijana Zrnic , Emmanuel J. Candès

Active inference is an ambitious theory that treats perception, inference and action selection of autonomous agents under the heading of a single principle. It suggests biologically plausible explanations for many cognitive phenomena,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-22 Martin Biehl , Christian Guckelsberger , Christoph Salge , Simón C. Smith , Daniel Polani

The active inference framework (AIF) is a promising new computational framework grounded in contemporary neuroscience that can produce human-like behavior through reward-based learning. In this study, we test the ability for the AIF to…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2022-11-21 Zhizhuo Yang , Gabriel J. Diaz , Brett R. Fajen , Reynold Bailey , Alexander Ororbia

Providing artificial agents with the same computational models of biological systems is a way to understand how intelligent behaviours may emerge. We present an active inference body perception and action model working for the first time in…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Guillermo Oliver , Pablo Lanillos , Gordon Cheng

Recent advances in theoretical biology suggest that basal cognition and sentient behaviour are emergent properties of in vitro cell cultures and neuronal networks, respectively. Such neuronal networks spontaneously learn structured…

In this paper we introduce a general estimation methodology for learning a model of human perception and control in a sensorimotor control task based upon a finite set of demonstrations. The model's structure consists of i the agent's…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-02 Ran Wei , Anthony D. McDonald , Alfredo Garcia , Gustav Markkula , Johan Engstrom , Matthew O'Kelly

We present a categorical formulation of the cognitive frameworks of Predictive Processing and Active Inference, expressed in terms of string diagrams interpreted in a monoidal category with copying and discarding. This includes diagrammatic…

Category Theory · Mathematics 2023-08-03 Sean Tull , Johannes Kleiner , Toby St Clere Smithe

We present the design of an autoregressive active inference agent in the form of message passing on a factor graph. Expected free energy is derived and distributed across a planning graph. The proposed agent is validated on a robot…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-01-21 Wouter M. Kouw , Tim N. Nisslbeck , Wouter L. N. Nuijten

This paper argues that Active Inference (AIF) provides a crucial foundation for developing autonomous AI agents capable of learning from experience without continuous human reward engineering. As AI systems begin to exhaust high-quality…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Bo Wen

Active inference is a unifying theory for perception and action resting upon the idea that the brain maintains an internal model of the world by minimizing free energy. From a behavioral perspective, active inference agents can be seen as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-17 Pietro Mazzaglia , Tim Verbelen , Bart Dhoedt

This paper introduces a novel approach to creating adaptive language agents by integrating active inference with large language models (LLMs). While LLMs demonstrate remarkable capabilities, their reliance on static prompts limits…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-01-13 Rithvik Prakki

Branching Time Active Inference (Champion et al., 2021b,a) is a framework proposing to look at planning as a form of Bayesian model expansion. Its root can be found in Active Inference (Friston et al., 2016; Da Costa et al., 2020; Champion…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-15 Théophile Champion , Marek Grześ , Howard Bowman

Agent Based Modelling (ABM) is a computational framework for simulating the behaviours and interactions of autonomous agents. As Agent Based Models are usually representative of complex systems, obtaining a likelihood function of the model…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-07-09 D. Townsend

We discuss an approach to mathematically modelling systems made of objects that are coupled together, using generative models of the dependence relationships between states (or trajectories) of the things comprising such systems. This broad…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2026-01-28 Karl J Friston , Maxwell J D Ramstead , Dalton A R Sakthivadivel

We explore the use of Active Inference (AIF) as a computational user model for spatial pointing, a key problem in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). We present an AIF agent with continuous state, action, and observation spaces, performing…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2025-10-17 Markus Klar , Sebastian Stein , Fraser Paterson , John H. Williamson , Roderick Murray-Smith