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Related papers: Whence the Expected Free Energy?

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The free energy principle has been proposed as a unifying account of brain function. It is closely related, and in some cases subsumes, earlier unifying ideas such as Bayesian inference, predictive coding, and active learning. This article…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2022-11-30 Samuel J. Gershman

Organisms are nonequilibrium, stationary systems self-organized via spontaneous symmetry breaking and undergoing metabolic cycles with broken detailed balance in the environment. The thermodynamic free-energy principle describes an…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2022-11-24 Chang Sub Kim

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

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

Stacking Fault Energy (SFE) is an intrinsic alloy property that governs much of the plastic deformation mechanisms observed in fcc alloys. While SFE has been recognized for many years as a key intrinsic mechanical property, its inference…

As a unified theory of sentient behaviour, active inference is formally intertwined with multiple normative theories of optimal behaviour. Specifically, we address what we call the subsumption thesis: The claim that expected utility from…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-03-10 Noe Kuhn

Purpose and meaning are necessary concepts for understanding mind and culture, but appear to be absent from the physical world and are not part of the explanatory framework of the natural sciences. Understanding how meaning (in the broad…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2015-02-04 J. H. van Hateren

In this paper, we derive the Einstein's field equation (EFE) by considering an non-commuting two dimensional quantized space, which can be excited by absorbing energy. Any variation of the energy level of space quantas, will result in a…

General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology · Physics 2020-01-16 Ramin Hassannejad , S. Navid Mousavi

The Effective Field Theory (EFT) of Dark Energy (DE) is a model independent framework that allows for the description of a wide class of dark energy and modified gravity models. This is achieved by extending the Hilbert Einstein action…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2025-07-25 Federico Armato , Edoardo Martinelli , Marco Raveri

The free energy principle (FEP), as an encompassing framework and a unified brain theory, has been widely applied to account for various problems in fields such as cognitive science, neuroscience, social interaction, and hermeneutics. As a…

Neural and Evolutionary Computing · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Jingwei Liu

The free energy principle (FEP) in the neurosciences stipulates that all viable agents induce and minimize informational free energy in the brain to fit their environmental niche. In this study, we continue our effort to make the FEP a more…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2021-01-25 Chang Sub Kim

Given a chemical reaction going from reactant (R) to the product (P) on a potential energy surface (PES) and a collective variable (CV) that discriminates between R and P, one can define a free-energy profile (FEP) as the logarithm of the…

This white paper lays out a vision of research and development in the field of artificial intelligence for the next decade (and beyond). Its denouement is a cyber-physical ecosystem of natural and synthetic sense-making, in which humans are…

The goal of these lecture notes is to review the problem of free energy minimization as a unified framework underlying the definition of maximum entropy modelling, generalized Bayesian inference, learning with latent variables, statistical…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-12-01 Sharu Theresa Jose , Osvaldo Simeone

Active event perception, the ability to dynamically detect, track, and summarize events in real time, is essential for embodied intelligence in tasks such as human-AI collaboration, assistive robotics, and autonomous navigation. However,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Zhou Chen , Sanjoy Kundu , Harsimran S. Baweja , Sathyanarayanan N. Aakur

Active Inference (AIF) is emerging as a powerful framework for decision-making under uncertainty, yet its potential in engineering applications remains largely unexplored. In this work, we propose a novel dual-layer AIF architecture that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-03-25 Seyyed Danial Nazemi , Mohsen A. Jafari , Andrea Matta

We propose an Expected Free Energy-based acquisition function for Bayesian optimization to solve the joint learning and optimization problem, i.e., optimize and learn the underlying function simultaneously. We show that, under specific…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-30 Ajith Anil Meera , Wouter Kouw

Jarzynski's equality [1] allows us to investigate free energy landscapes (FELs) by constructing distributions of work performed on a system from an initial ensemble of states to final states. This work is experimentally measured by…

Biological Physics · Physics 2011-05-24 Van Ngo

The relationship between Integrated Information Theory (IIT) and the Free-Energy Principle (FEP) remains unresolved, particularly with respect to how integrated information, proposed as the intrinsic substrate of consciousness, behaves…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-10-07 Teruki Mayama , Sota Shimizu , Yuki Takano , Dai Akita , Hirokazu Takahashi

Estimating the free energy in molecular simulation requires, implicitly or explicitly, counting how many times the system is observed in a finite region. If the simulation is biased by an external potential, the weight of the configurations…

Chemical Physics · Physics 2021-12-22 Matteo Carli , Alessandro Laio