Related papers: Awareness as inference in a higher-order state spa…

This work seeks to study the beneficial properties that an autonomous agent can obtain by implementing a cognitive architecture similar to the one of conscious beings. Along this document, a conscious model of autonomous agent based in a…

Cognitive maps play a crucial role in facilitating flexible behaviour by representing spatial and conceptual relationships within an environment. The ability to learn and infer the underlying structure of the environment is crucial for…

Active inference is a mathematical framework which originated in computational neuroscience as a theory of how the brain implements action, perception and learning. Recently, it has been shown to be a promising approach to the problems of…

Because we are highly motivated to be understood, we created public external representations -- mime, language, art -- to externalise our inner states. We argue that such external representations are a pre-condition for access…

Cognitive imagination is a type of imagination that plays a key role in human thinking. It is not a ``picture-in-the-head'' imagination. It is a faculty to mentally visualize coherent and holistic systems of concepts and causal links that…

Active Inference is a closed-loop computational theoretical basis for understanding behaviour, based on agents with internal probabilistic generative models that encode their beliefs about how hidden states in their environment cause their…

This technical note considers the sampling of outcomes that provide the greatest amount of information about the structure of underlying world models. This generalisation furnishes a principled approach to structure learning under a…

When people share the same documents and observations yet reach different conclusions, the disagreement often shifts into a judgment that the other party is cognitively defective, irrational, or acting in bad faith. This paper argues that…

Whether current or near-term AI systems could be conscious is a topic of scientific interest and increasing public concern. This report argues for, and exemplifies, a rigorous and empirically grounded approach to AI consciousness: assessing…

Recent developments in machine learning have pushed the tasks that machines can do outside the boundaries of what was thought to be possible years ago. Methodologies such as deep learning or generative models have achieved complex tasks…

The Common Model of Cognition (CMC) provides an abstract characterization of the structure and processing required by a cognitive architecture for human-like minds. We propose a unified approach to integrating metacognition within the CMC.…

Hierarchies feature prominently in anatomical accounts of cortical organisation. An open question is which computational (algorithmic) processes are implemented by these hierarchies. One renowned hypothesis is that cortical hierarchies…

In recent years, there has been an increased need for the use of active systems - systems required to act automatically based on events, or changes in the environment. Such systems span many areas, from active databases to applications that…

Humans possess the capability to reason at an abstract level and to structure information into abstract categories, but the underlying neural processes have remained unknown. Experimental evidence has recently emerged for the organization…

Large language models often reason beyond surface tokens, but the internal stage at which token-level information becomes abstract relational structure remains unclear. We investigate this question by analyzing how attention heads and…

Conscious experience permeates our daily lives, yet general consensus on a theory of consciousness remains elusive. In the face of such difficulty, an alternative strategy is to address a more general (meta-level) version of the problem for…

Active inference (AI) is a persuasive theoretical framework from computational neuroscience that seeks to describe action and perception as inference-based computation. However, this framework has yet to provide practical sensorimotor…

Active inference is a normative framework for explaining behaviour under the free energy principle -- a theory of self-organisation originating in neuroscience. It specifies neuronal dynamics for state-estimation in terms of a descent on…

In many, if not every realistic sequential decision-making task, the decision-making agent is not able to model the full complexity of the world. The environment is often much larger and more complex than the agent, a setting also known as…

The underlying physiological mechanisms of generating conscious states are still unknown. To make progress on the problem of consciousness, we will need to experimentally design a system that evolves in a similar way our brains do. Recent…