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Main Authors: Champion, Théophile, Bowman, Howard, Marković, Dimitrije, Grześ, Marek
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14460
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author Champion, Théophile
Bowman, Howard
Marković, Dimitrije
Grześ, Marek
author_facet Champion, Théophile
Bowman, Howard
Marković, Dimitrije
Grześ, Marek
contents 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 justified by the intuitive plausibility of its formulations, e.g., the risk plus ambiguity and information gain / pragmatic value formulations. This paper seek to formalize the problem of deriving these formulations from a single root expected free energy definition, i.e., the unification problem. Then, we study two settings, each one having its own root expected free energy definition. In the first setting, no justification for the expected free energy has been proposed to date, but all the formulations can be recovered from it. However, in this setting, the agent cannot have arbitrary prior preferences over observations. Indeed, only a limited class of prior preferences over observations is compatible with the likelihood mapping of the generative model. In the second setting, a justification of the root expected free energy definition is known, but this setting only accounts for two formulations, i.e., the risk over states plus ambiguity and entropy plus expected energy formulations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_14460
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Reframing the Expected Free Energy: Four Formulations and a Unification
Champion, Théophile
Bowman, Howard
Marković, Dimitrije
Grześ, Marek
Artificial Intelligence
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 justified by the intuitive plausibility of its formulations, e.g., the risk plus ambiguity and information gain / pragmatic value formulations. This paper seek to formalize the problem of deriving these formulations from a single root expected free energy definition, i.e., the unification problem. Then, we study two settings, each one having its own root expected free energy definition. In the first setting, no justification for the expected free energy has been proposed to date, but all the formulations can be recovered from it. However, in this setting, the agent cannot have arbitrary prior preferences over observations. Indeed, only a limited class of prior preferences over observations is compatible with the likelihood mapping of the generative model. In the second setting, a justification of the root expected free energy definition is known, but this setting only accounts for two formulations, i.e., the risk over states plus ambiguity and entropy plus expected energy formulations.
title Reframing the Expected Free Energy: Four Formulations and a Unification
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14460