Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Fujii, Kentaro, Murata, Shingo
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01924
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908684498501632
author Fujii, Kentaro
Murata, Shingo
author_facet Fujii, Kentaro
Murata, Shingo
contents Robots in uncertain real-world environments must perform both goal-directed and exploratory actions. However, most deep learning-based control methods neglect exploration and struggle under uncertainty. To address this, we adopt deep active inference, a framework that accounts for human goal-directed and exploratory actions. Yet, conventional deep active inference approaches face challenges due to limited environmental representation capacity and high computational cost in action selection. We propose a novel deep active inference framework that consists of a world model, an action model, and an abstract world model. The world model encodes environmental dynamics into hidden state representations at slow and fast timescales. The action model compresses action sequences into abstract actions using vector quantization, and the abstract world model predicts future slow states conditioned on the abstract action, enabling low-cost action selection. We evaluate the framework on object-manipulation tasks with a real-world robot. Results show that it achieves high success rates across diverse manipulation tasks and switches between goal-directed and exploratory actions in uncertain settings, while making action selection computationally tractable. These findings highlight the importance of modeling multiple timescale dynamics and abstracting actions and state transitions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_01924
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Real-World Robot Control by Deep Active Inference With a Temporally Hierarchical World Model
Fujii, Kentaro
Murata, Shingo
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Robots in uncertain real-world environments must perform both goal-directed and exploratory actions. However, most deep learning-based control methods neglect exploration and struggle under uncertainty. To address this, we adopt deep active inference, a framework that accounts for human goal-directed and exploratory actions. Yet, conventional deep active inference approaches face challenges due to limited environmental representation capacity and high computational cost in action selection. We propose a novel deep active inference framework that consists of a world model, an action model, and an abstract world model. The world model encodes environmental dynamics into hidden state representations at slow and fast timescales. The action model compresses action sequences into abstract actions using vector quantization, and the abstract world model predicts future slow states conditioned on the abstract action, enabling low-cost action selection. We evaluate the framework on object-manipulation tasks with a real-world robot. Results show that it achieves high success rates across diverse manipulation tasks and switches between goal-directed and exploratory actions in uncertain settings, while making action selection computationally tractable. These findings highlight the importance of modeling multiple timescale dynamics and abstracting actions and state transitions.
title Real-World Robot Control by Deep Active Inference With a Temporally Hierarchical World Model
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.01924