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Active inference is a leading theory of perception, learning and decision making, which can be applied to neuroscience, robotics, psychology, and machine learning. Active inference is based on the expected free energy, which is mostly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Théophile Champion , Howard Bowman , Dimitrije Marković , Marek Grześ

Physical AI agents, such as robots and other embodied systems operating under tight and fluctuating resource constraints, remain far less capable than biological agents in open-ended real-world environments. This paper argues that Active…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-03-24 Bert de Vries

Active inference is a normative principle underwriting perception, action, planning, decision-making and learning in biological or artificial agents. From its inception, its associated process theory has grown to incorporate complex…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2021-02-02 Lancelot Da Costa , Thomas Parr , Noor Sajid , Sebastijan Veselic , Victorita Neacsu , Karl Friston

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

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…

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 provides a general framework for behavior and learning in autonomous agents. It states that an agent will attempt to minimize its variational free energy, defined in terms of beliefs over observations, internal states and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-09-12 Samuel T. Wauthier , Bram Vanhecke , Tim Verbelen , Bart Dhoedt

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

We investigate the application of active inference in developing energy-efficient control agents for manufacturing systems. Active inference, rooted in neuroscience, provides a unified probabilistic framework integrating perception,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Yavar Taheri Yeganeh , Mohsen Jafari , Andrea Matta

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…

This paper investigates the prospect of developing human-interpretable, explainable artificial intelligence (AI) systems based on active inference and the free energy principle. We first provide a brief overview of active inference, and in…

In the last decade, the free energy principle (FEP) and active inference (AIF) have achieved many successes connecting conceptual models of learning and cognition to mathematical models of perception and action. This effort is driven by a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Joséphine Pazem , Marius Krumm , Alexander Q. Vining , Lukas J. Fiderer , Hans J. Briegel

Deep active inference has been proposed as a scalable approach to perception and action that deals with large policy and state spaces. However, current models are limited to fully observable domains. In this paper, we describe a deep active…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-02-08 Otto van der Himst , Pablo Lanillos

Active inference is a first principle account of how autonomous agents operate in dynamic, non-stationary environments. This problem is also considered in reinforcement learning (RL), but limited work exists on comparing the two approaches…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-15 Noor Sajid , Philip J. Ball , Thomas Parr , Karl J. Friston

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 is emerging as a possible unifying theory of perception and action in cognitive and computational neuroscience. On this theory, perception is a process of inferring the causes of sensory data by minimising the error between…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2022-03-10 Manuel Baltieri , Christopher L. Buckley

Despite their groundbreaking performance, autonomous agents can misbehave when training and environmental conditions become inconsistent, with minor mismatches leading to undesirable behaviors or even catastrophic failures. Robustness…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Allahkaram Shafiei , Hozefa Jesawada , Karl Friston , Giovanni Russo

Optimal control of complex environments with robotic systems faces two complementary and intertwined challenges: efficient organization of sensory state information and far-sighted action planning. Because the reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-30 Abdullah Akgül , Gulcin Baykal , Manuel Haußmann , Mustafa Mert Çelikok , Melih Kandemir

We address the problem of planning under uncertainty, where an agent must choose actions that not only achieve desired outcomes but also reduce uncertainty. Traditional methods often treat exploration and exploitation as separate…