Related papers: Environment-Centric Active Inference
Objects rarely sit in isolation in everyday human environments. If we want robots to operate and perform tasks in our human environments, they must understand how the objects they manipulate will interact with structural elements of the…
The aim of this paper is to leverage the free-energy principle and its corollary process theory, active inference, to develop a generic, generalizable model of the representational capacities of living creatures; that is, a theory of…
To determine an optimal plan for complex tasks, one often deals with dynamic and hierarchical relationships between several entities. Traditionally, such problems are tackled with optimal control, which relies on the optimization of cost…
Agentic LLM AI agents are often little more than autonomous chatbots: actors following scripts, often controlled by an unreliable director. This work introduces a bottom-up framework that situates AI agents in their environment, with all…
A common vision from science fiction is that robots will one day inhabit our physical spaces, sense the world as we do, assist our physical labours, and communicate with us through natural language. Here we study how to design artificial…
Drawing inspiration from animal navigation strategies, we introduce a novel computational model for navigation and mapping, rooted in biologically inspired principles. Animals exhibit remarkable navigation abilities by efficiently using…
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…
It is crucial to ask how agents can achieve goals by generating action plans using only partial models of the world acquired through habituated sensory-motor experiences. Although many existing robotics studies use a forward model…
A common assumption when training embodied agents is that the impact of taking an action is stable; for instance, executing the "move ahead" action will always move the agent forward by a fixed distance, perhaps with some small amount of…
Agent-based modeling is a computational dynamic modeling technique that may be less familiar to some readers. Agent-based modeling seeks to understand the behaviour of complex systems by situating agents in an environment and studying the…
The development of embodied agents that can communicate with humans in natural language has gained increasing interest over the last years, as it facilitates the diffusion of robotic platforms in human-populated environments. As a step…
Active matter, as other types of self-organizing systems, relies on the take-up of energy that can be used for different actions, such as active motion or structure formation. Here we provide an agent-based framework to model these…
Multi-agent human-robot co-manipulation is a poorly understood process with many inputs that potentially affect agent behavior. This paper explores one such input known as interaction force. Interaction force is potentially a primary…
We advance a novel computational model of multi-agent, cooperative joint actions that is grounded in the cognitive framework of active inference. The model assumes that to solve a joint task, such as pressing together a red or blue button,…
We present the design of an autoregressive active inference agent in the form of message passing on a factor graph. Expected free energy is derived and distributed across a planning graph. The proposed agent is validated on a robot…
Interacting with human agents in complex scenarios presents a significant challenge for robotic navigation, particularly in environments that necessitate both collision avoidance and collaborative interaction, such as indoor spaces. Unlike…
Active learning agents typically employ a query selection algorithm which solely considers the agent's learning objectives. However, this may be insufficient in more realistic human domains. This work uses imitation learning to enable an…
If a robotic agent wants to exploit symbolic planning techniques to achieve some goal, it must be able to properly ground an abstract planning domain in the environment in which it operates. However, if the environment is initially unknown…
Humans perceive and interact with hundreds of objects every day. In doing so, they need to employ mental models of these objects and often exploit symmetries in the object's shape and appearance in order to learn generalizable and…
There exist well-developed frameworks for causal modelling, but these require rather a lot of human domain expertise to define causal variables and perform interventions. In order to enable autonomous agents to learn abstract causal models…