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We address the problem of planning under uncertainty, where an agent must choose actions that not only achieve desired outcomes but also reduce uncertainty. Traditional methods often treat exploration and exploitation as separate…

Expected free energy (EFE) is a central quantity in active inference which has recently gained popularity due to its intuitive decomposition of the expected value of control into a pragmatic and an epistemic component. While numerous…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-14 Ran Wei

Active Inference is a theory of action arising from neuroscience which casts action and planning as a bayesian inference problem to be solved by minimizing a single quantity - the variational free energy. Active Inference promises a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-10 Beren Millidge

Active inference is a leading theory of perception, learning and decision making, which can be applied to neuroscience, robotics, psychology, and machine learning. Active inference is based on the expected free energy, which is mostly…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Théophile Champion , Howard Bowman , Dimitrije Marković , Marek Grześ

The Expected Free Energy (EFE) is a central quantity in the theory of active inference. It is the quantity that all active inference agents are mandated to minimize through action, and its decomposition into extrinsic and intrinsic value…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-09-30 Beren Millidge , Alexander Tschantz , Christopher L Buckley

Micro-gestures are subtle and transient movements triggered by unconscious neural and emotional activities, holding great potential for human-computer interaction and clinical monitoring. However, their low amplitude, short duration, and…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Weijia Feng , Jingyu Yang , Ruojia Zhang , Fengtao Sun , Qian Gao , Chenyang Wang , Tongtong Su , Jia Guo , Xiaobai Li , Minglai Shao

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Riko Yokozawa , Kentaro Fujii , Yuta Nomura , Shingo Murata

Active inference is a state-of-the-art framework in neuroscience that offers a unified theory of brain function. It is also proposed as a framework for planning in AI. Unfortunately, the complex mathematics required to create new models --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-11 Théophile Champion , Marek Grześ , Howard Bowman

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,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Yavar Taheri Yeganeh , Mohsen Jafari , Andrea Matta

Active inference (AIF) unifies exploration and exploitation by minimizing the Expected Free Energy (EFE), balancing epistemic value (information gain) and pragmatic value (task performance) through a curiosity coefficient. Yet it has been…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Yingke Li , Anjali Parashar , Enlu Zhou , Chuchu Fan

Active inference has emerged as an alternative approach to control problems given its intuitive (probabilistic) formalism. However, despite its theoretical utility, computational implementations have largely been restricted to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-01 Aswin Paul , Noor Sajid , Manoj Gopalkrishnan , Adeel Razi

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-04-07 Thijs van de Laar , Magnus Koudahl , Bart van Erp , Bert de Vries

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.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Filippo Torresan , Keisuke Suzuki , Ryota Kanai , Manuel Baltieri

Active inference offers a first principle account of sentient behaviour, from which special and important cases can be derived, e.g., reinforcement learning, active learning, Bayes optimal inference, Bayes optimal design, etc. Active…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2020-06-09 Karl Friston , Lancelot Da Costa , Danijar Hafner , Casper Hesp , Thomas Parr

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Prashant Rangarajan , Rajesh P. N. Rao

Branching Time Active Inference (Champion et al., 2021b,a) is a framework proposing to look at planning as a form of Bayesian model expansion. Its root can be found in Active Inference (Friston et al., 2016; Da Costa et al., 2020; Champion…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-15 Théophile Champion , Marek Grześ , Howard Bowman

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…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-01-03 Thijs van de Laar , Magnus Koudahl , Bert de Vries

Active inference, a corollary of the free energy principle, is a formal way of describing the behavior of certain kinds of random dynamical systems that have the appearance of sentience. In this chapter, we describe how active inference…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2021-10-11 Noor Sajid , Lancelot Da Costa , Thomas Parr , Karl Friston

How to efficiently explore in reinforcement learning is an open problem. Many exploration algorithms employ the epistemic uncertainty of their own value predictions -- for instance to compute an exploration bonus or upper confidence bound.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-03-08 Simon Schmitt , John Shawe-Taylor , Hado van Hasselt

Active Inference, grounded in the Free Energy Principle, provides a powerful lens for understanding how agents balance exploration and goal-directed behavior in uncertain environments. Here, we propose a new planning framework, that…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Mawaba Pascal Dao , Adrian M. Peter
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