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Related papers: Sophisticated Inference

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Active Inference (ActInf) is an emerging theory that explains perception and action in biological agents, in terms of minimizing a free energy bound on Bayesian surprise. Goal-directed behavior is elicited by introducing prior beliefs on…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-07-28 Thijs van de Laar , Ismail Senoz , Ayça Özçelikkale , Henk Wymeersch

Bayesian inference has theoretical attractions as a principled framework for reasoning about beliefs. However, the motivations of Bayesian inference which claim it to be the only 'rational' kind of reasoning do not apply in practice. They…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-11-14 Sebastian Farquhar

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

Adaptive behavior in volatile environments requires agents to switch among value-control regimes across latent contexts, but maintaining separate preferences, policy biases, and action-confidence parameters for every situation is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-16 Jacob Poschl

There is a long history in game theory on the topic of Bayesian or "rational" learning, in which each player maintains beliefs over a set of alternative behaviours, or types, for the other players. This idea has gained increasing interest…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-03-03 Stefano V. Albrecht , Jacob W. Crandall , Subramanian Ramamoorthy

We introduce Sophisticated Learning (SL), a planning-to-learn algorithm that embeds active parameter learning inside the Sophisticated Inference (SI) tree-search framework of Active Inference. Unlike SI -- which optimizes beliefs about…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-18 Rowan Hodson , Bruce Bassett , Charel van Hoof , Benjamin Rosman , Mark Solms , Jonathan P. Shock , Ryan Smith

Efficient exploration is an unsolved problem in Reinforcement Learning which is usually addressed by reactively rewarding the agent for fortuitously encountering novel situations. This paper introduces an efficient active exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-17 Pranav Shyam , Wojciech Jaśkowski , Faustino Gomez

The multifaceted nature of subjective experience poses a challenge to the study of consciousness. Traditional neuroscientific approaches often concentrate on isolated facets, such as perceptual awareness or the global state of consciousness…

Flexible, goal-directed behavior is a fundamental aspect of human life. Based on the free energy minimization principle, the theory of active inference formalizes the generation of such behavior from a computational neuroscience…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-08-03 Fedor Scholz , Christian Gumbsch , Sebastian Otte , Martin V. Butz

With recent and rapid advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), understanding the foundation of purposeful behaviour in autonomous agents is crucial for developing safe and efficient systems. While artificial neural networks have…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Aswin Paul , Moein Khajehnejad , Forough Habibollahi , Brett J. Kagan , Adeel Razi

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-02 Joe Watson , Abraham Imohiosen , Jan Peters

Explanations for AI models in high-stakes domains like medicine often lack verifiability, which can hinder trust. To address this, we propose an interactive agent that produces explanations through an auditable sequence of actions. The…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Yuhang Huang , Zekai Lin , Fan Zhong , Lei Liu

Active perception approaches select future viewpoints by using some estimate of the information gain. An inaccurate estimate can be detrimental in critical situations, e.g., locating a person in distress. However the true information gained…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Siming He , Yuezhan Tao , Igor Spasojevic , Vijay Kumar , Pratik Chaudhari

We describe a framework of hybrid cognition by formulating a hybrid cognitive agent that performs hierarchical active inference across a human and a machine part. We suggest that, in addition to enhancing human cognitive functions with an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-10-08 André Ofner , Sebastian Stober

An important use of machine learning is to learn what people value. What posts or photos should a user be shown? Which jobs or activities would a person find rewarding? In each case, observations of people's past choices can inform our…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-12-21 Owain Evans , Andreas Stuhlmueller , Noah D. Goodman

Active inference (AIF) unifies exploration and exploitation by minimizing the Expected Free Energy (EFE), balancing epistemic value (information gain) and pragmatic value (task performance) through a curiosity coefficient. Yet it has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Yingke Li , Anjali Parashar , Enlu Zhou , Chuchu Fan

The Free Energy Principle (FEP) postulates that biological agents perceive and interact with their environment in order to minimize a Variational Free Energy (VFE) with respect to a generative model of their environment. The inference of a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-07 Thijs van de Laar , Magnus Koudahl , Bart van Erp , Bert de Vries

We show that it can be suboptimal for Bayesian decision-making agents employing social learning to use correct prior probabilities as their initial beliefs. We consider sequential Bayesian binary hypothesis testing where each individual…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Joong Bum Rhim , Vivek K Goyal

Existing approaches to reward inference from behavior typically assume that humans provide demonstrations according to specific models of behavior. However, humans often indicate their goals through a wide range of behaviors, from actions…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-26 Will Schwarzer , Jordan Schneider , Philip S. Thomas , Scott Niekum

In earlier work, we introduced the framework of language-based decisions, the core idea of which was to modify Savage's classical decision-theoretic framework by taking actions to be descriptions in some language, rather than functions from…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Adam Bjorndahl , Joseph Y. Halpern