Related papers: Free Energy Projective Simulation (FEPS): Active i…
Research on the so-called "free-energy principle'' (FEP) in cognitive neuroscience is becoming increasingly high-profile. To date, introductions to this theory have proved difficult for many readers to follow, but it depends mainly upon two…
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…
Active inference is a mathematical framework for understanding how agents (biological or artificial) interact with their environments, enabling continual adaptation and decision-making. It combines Bayesian inference and free energy…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has garnered significant attention for developing decision-making agents that aim to maximize rewards, specified by an external supervisor, within fully observable environments. However, many real-world problems…
Active inference, a neurally-inspired model for inferring actions based on the free energy principle (FEP), has been proposed as a unifying framework for understanding perception, action, and learning in the brain. Active inference has…
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…
In reinforcement learning (RL), agents often operate in partially observed and uncertain environments. Model-based RL suggests that this is best achieved by learning and exploiting a probabilistic model of the world. 'Active inference' is…
The Free Energy Principle (FEP) describes (biological) agents as minimising a variational Free Energy (FE) with respect to a generative model of their environment. Active Inference (AIF) is a corollary of the FEP that describes how agents…
The free energy principle, and its corollary active inference, constitute a bio-inspired theory that assumes biological agents act to remain in a restricted set of preferred states of the world, i.e., they minimize their free energy. Under…
Active inference helps us simulate adaptive behavior and decision-making in biological and artificial agents. Building on our previous work exploring the relationship between active inference, well-being, resilience, and sustainability, we…
Is there a canonical way to think of agency beyond reward maximisation? In this paper, we show that any type of behaviour complying with physically sound assumptions about how macroscopic biological agents interact with the world…
Intelligent agents must pursue their goals in complex environments with partial information and often limited computational capacity. Reinforcement learning methods have achieved great success by creating agents that optimize engineered…
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…
Active inference is a formal approach to study cognition based on the notion that adaptive agents can be seen as engaging in a process of approximate Bayesian inference, via the minimisation of variational and expected free energies.…
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…
The central tenet of reinforcement learning (RL) is that agents seek to maximize the sum of cumulative rewards. In contrast, active inference, an emerging framework within cognitive and computational neuroscience, proposes that agents act…
The active inference framework (AIF) is a promising new computational framework grounded in contemporary neuroscience that can produce human-like behavior through reward-based learning. In this study, we test the ability for the AIF to…
Autonomous robotic navigation in real-world environments requires exploration to acquire environmental information as well as goal-directed navigation in order to reach specified targets. Active inference (AIF) based on the free-energy…
This paper argues that Active Inference (AIF) provides a crucial foundation for developing autonomous AI agents capable of learning from experience without continuous human reward engineering. As AI systems begin to exhaust high-quality…
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…