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Related papers: Universal AI maximizes Variational Empowerment

200 papers

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

Background: Exploration of the physical environment is an indispensable precursor to information acquisition and knowledge consolidation for living organisms. Yet, current artificial intelligence models lack these autonomy capabilities…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-10 Gustavo Assunção , Miguel Castelo-Branco , Paulo Menezes

The development of a generalist agent capable of solving a wide range of sequential decision-making tasks remains a significant challenge. We address this problem in a cross-agent setup where agents share the same observation space but…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Niklas Höpner , David Kuric , Herke van Hoof

We introduce a methodology for efficiently computing a lower bound to empowerment, allowing it to be used as an unsupervised cost function for policy learning in real-time control. Empowerment, being the channel capacity between actions and…

Autonomy is a hallmark of animal intelligence, enabling adaptive and intelligent behavior in complex environments without relying on external reward or task structure. Existing reinforcement learning approaches to exploration in reward-free…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-10-27 Reece Keller , Alyn Kirsch , Felix Pei , Xaq Pitkow , Leo Kozachkov , Aran Nayebi

If capable AI agents are generally incentivized to seek power in service of the objectives we specify for them, then these systems will pose enormous risks, in addition to enormous benefits. In fully observable environments, most reward…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-10-13 Alexander Matt Turner , Prasad Tadepalli

The aim of this work is to address the question of whether we can in principle design rational decision-making agents or artificial intelligences embedded in computable physics such that their decisions are optimal in reasonable…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2010-01-19 Anthony Di Franco

During the first step of practical reasoning, i.e. deliberation or goals selection, an intelligent agent generates a set of pursuable goals and then selects which of them he commits to achieve. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Mariela Morveli-Espinoza , Cesar Augusto Tacla , Henrique Jasinski

What drives exploration? Understanding intrinsic motivation is a long-standing challenge in both cognitive science and artificial intelligence; numerous objectives have been proposed and used to train agents, yet there remains a gap between…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Aly Lidayan , Yuqing Du , Eliza Kosoy , Maria Rufova , Pieter Abbeel , Alison Gopnik

This work combines the free energy principle from cognitive neuroscience and the ensuing active inference dynamics with recent advances in variational inference in deep generative models, and evolution strategies to introduce the "deep…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2018-10-24 Kai Ueltzhöffer

Although exploratory behaviors are ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, their computational underpinnings are still largely unknown. Behavioral Psychology has identified learning as a primary drive underlying many exploratory behaviors.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2011-12-14 Daniel Y. Little , Friedrich T. Sommer

The rapid advancement of machine learning techniques has re-energized research into general artificial intelligence. While the idea of domain-agnostic meta-learning is appealing, this emerging field must come to terms with its relationship…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-01-17 Steven Stenberg Hansen

In this paper we introduce a new unsupervised reinforcement learning method for discovering the set of intrinsic options available to an agent. This set is learned by maximizing the number of different states an agent can reliably reach, as…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-11-23 Karol Gregor , Danilo Jimenez Rezende , Daan Wierstra

Collective intelligence emerges across biological, physical, and artificial systems without central coordination, yet a unifying principle governing such behaviour remains elusive. The Free Energy Principle explains how individual agents…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Djamel Bouchaffra , Faycal Ykhlef , Mustapha Lebbah , Hanane Azzag

We give a brief introduction to the AIXI model, which unifies and overcomes the limitations of sequential decision theory and universal Solomonoff induction. While the former theory is suited for active agents in known environments, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Marcus Hutter

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

This paper develops generalizations of empowerment to continuous states. Empowerment is a recently introduced information-theoretic quantity motivated by hypotheses about the efficiency of the sensorimotor loop in biological organisms, but…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-02-01 Tobias Jung , Daniel Polani , Peter Stone

In continuous control, exploration is often performed through undirected strategies in which parameters of the networks or selected actions are perturbed by random noise. Although the deep setting of undirected exploration has been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-10-04 Baturay Saglam , Suleyman S. Kozat

Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an intelligent system formed by agents and their environment through active perception, embodied cognition, and action interaction. Existing embodied AI remains confined to human-crafted setting, in…

Emerging Technologies · Computer Science 2026-02-05 Tongtong Feng , Xin Wang , Wenwu Zhu

Efficient exploration remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning, especially for tasks where extrinsic rewards from environments are sparse or even totally disregarded. Significant advances based on intrinsic motivation show…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-03 Chenjia Bai , Peng Liu , Kaiyu Liu , Lingxiao Wang , Yingnan Zhao , Lei Han