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The free energy principle (FEP) is a mathematical framework that describes how biological systems self-organize and survive in their environment. This principle provides insights on multiple scales, from high-level behavioral and cognitive…
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…
The Free-Energy-Principle (FEP) is an influential and controversial theory which postulates a deep and powerful connection between the stochastic thermodynamics of self-organization and learning through variational inference. Specifically,…
The 'free energy principle' (FEP) has been suggested to provide a unified theory of the brain, integrating data and theory relating to action, perception, and learning. The theory and implementation of the FEP combines insights from…
Learning, especially rapid learning, is critical for survival. However, learning is hard: a large number of synaptic weights must be set based on noisy, often ambiguous, sensory information. In such a high-noise regime, keeping track of…
The Free Energy Principle (FEP) states that under suitable conditions of weak coupling, random dynamical systems with sufficient degrees of freedom will behave so as to minimize an upper bound, formalized as a variational free energy, on…
Navigation in the natural world is a feat of adaptive inference, where biological organisms maintain goal-directed behaviour despite noisy and incomplete sensory streams. Central to this ability is the Free Energy Principle (FEP), which…
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…
In this PhD thesis, we explore and apply methods inspired by the free energy principle to two important areas in machine learning and neuroscience. The free energy principle is a general mathematical theory of the necessary…
We propose an embodied system based on the free energy principle (FEP) for sensorimotor visual perception. We evaluated it in a character-recognition task using the MNIST dataset. Although the FEP has successfully described a rule that…
Bayesian inference provides a principled framework for understanding brain function, while neural activity in the brain is inherently spike-based. This paper bridges these two perspectives by designing spiking neural networks that simulate…
Bayesian interpretations of neural processing require that biological mechanisms represent and operate upon probability distributions in accordance with Bayes' theorem. Many have speculated that synaptic failure constitutes a mechanism of…
The free energy principle (FEP) states that any dynamical system can be interpreted as performing Bayesian inference upon its surrounding environment. In this work, we examine in depth the assumptions required to derive the FEP in the…
This thesis focuses on three fundamental aspects of biological systems; namely, entropy production, Bayesian mechanics, and the free-energy principle. The contributions are threefold: 1) We compute the entropy production for a greater class…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) requires a large amount of exploration especially in sparse-reward settings. Imitation Learning (IL) can learn from expert demonstrations without exploration, but it never exceeds the expert's performance and is…
Deep learning has revolutionised artificial intelligence (AI) by enabling automatic feature extraction and function approximation from raw data. However, it faces challenges such as a lack of out-of-distribution generalisation, catastrophic…
Most normative models in computational neuroscience describe the task of learning as the optimisation of a cost function with respect to a set of parameters. However, learning as optimisation fails to account for a time varying environment…
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…
Biological neurons and their in-silico emulations for neuromorphic artificial intelligence (AI) use extraordinarily energy-efficient mechanisms, such as spike-based communication and local synaptic plasticity. It remains unclear whether…
This paper presents a model of consciousness that follows directly from the free-energy principle (FEP). We first rehearse the classical and quantum formulations of the FEP. In particular, we consider the inner screen hypothesis that…