Related papers: Environment-Centric Active Inference
One of the fundamental cognitive abilities of humans is to quickly resolve uncertainty by generating hypotheses and testing them via active trials. Encountering a novel phenomenon accompanied by ambiguous cause-effect relationships, humans…
Collective behavior pervades biological systems, from flocks of birds to neural assemblies and human societies. Yet, how such collectives acquire functional properties -- such as joint agency or knowledge -- that transcend those of their…
In order for robots and other artificial agents to efficiently learn to perform useful tasks defined by an end user, they must understand not only the goals of those tasks, but also the structure and dynamics of that user's environment.…
Complex behaviors are often driven by an internal model, which integrates sensory information over time and facilitates long-term planning. Inferring an agent's internal model is a crucial ingredient in social interactions (theory of mind),…
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,…
The proliferation of agentic artificial intelligence has outpaced the conceptual tools needed to characterize agency in computational systems. Prevailing definitions mainly rely on autonomy and goal-directedness. Here, we argue for a…
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…
Accomplishing household tasks requires to plan step-by-step actions considering the consequences of previous actions. However, the state-of-the-art embodied agents often make mistakes in navigating the environment and interacting with…
Active inference is a theory of perception, learning and decision making, which can be applied to neuroscience, robotics, and machine learning. Recently, reasearch has been taking place to scale up this framework using Monte-Carlo tree…
A large number of biological systems - from bacteria to sheep - can be described as ensembles of self-propelled agents (active particles) with a complex internal dynamic that controls the agent's behavior: resting, moving slow, moving fast,…
Perceiving the surrounding environment in terms of objects is useful for any general purpose intelligent agent. In this paper, we investigate a fundamental mechanism making object perception possible, namely the identification of…
Machine learning algorithms have been applied to predict agent behaviors in real-world dynamic systems, such as advertiser behaviors in sponsored search and worker behaviors in crowdsourcing. The behavior data in these systems are generated…
Active inference is a Bayesian framework for understanding biological intelligence. The underlying theory brings together perception and action under one single imperative: minimizing free energy. However, despite its theoretical utility in…
We consider an agent who represents uncertainty about the environment via a possibly misspecified model. Each period, the agent takes an action, observes a consequence, and uses Bayes' rule to update her belief about the environment. This…
This paper describes our research on AI agents embodied in visual, virtual or physical forms, enabling them to interact with both users and their environments. These agents, which include virtual avatars, wearable devices, and robots, are…
Recent research on human robot interaction explored whether people's tendency to conform to others extends to artificial agents (Hertz & Wiese, 2016). However, little is known about to what extent perception of a robot as having a mind…
Understanding emerging behaviors of reinforcement learning (RL) agents may be difficult since such agents are often trained in complex environments using highly complex decision making procedures. This has given rise to a variety of…
This thesis contributes to the formalisation of the notion of an agent within the class of finite multivariate Markov chains. Agents are seen as entities that act, perceive, and are goal-directed. We present a new measure that can be used…
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…
In standard Reinforcement Learning (RL) settings, the interaction between the agent and the environment is typically modeled as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), which assumes that the agent observes the system state instantaneously, selects…