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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Kenny, Patrick
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20321
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author Kenny, Patrick
author_facet Kenny, Patrick
contents We seek to clarify the concept of active inference by disentangling it from the Free Energy Principle. We show how the optimizations that need to be carried out in order to implement active inference in discrete state spaces can be formulated as constrained divergence minimization problems which can be solved by standard mean field methods that do not appeal to the idea of expected free energy. When it is used to model perception, the perception/action divergence criterion that we propose coincides with variational free energy. When it is used to model action, it differs from an expected free energy functional by an entropy regularizer.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_20321
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Active Inference in Discrete State Spaces from First Principles
Kenny, Patrick
Artificial Intelligence
We seek to clarify the concept of active inference by disentangling it from the Free Energy Principle. We show how the optimizations that need to be carried out in order to implement active inference in discrete state spaces can be formulated as constrained divergence minimization problems which can be solved by standard mean field methods that do not appeal to the idea of expected free energy. When it is used to model perception, the perception/action divergence criterion that we propose coincides with variational free energy. When it is used to model action, it differs from an expected free energy functional by an entropy regularizer.
title Active Inference in Discrete State Spaces from First Principles
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.20321