Realizing Active Inference in Variational Message Passing: The Outcome-Blind Certainty Seeker

DOI10.1162/NECO_A_01422zbMATH Open1481.91159arXiv2104.11798OpenAlexW3185904793MaRDI QIDQ5033554FDOQ5033554

Théophile Champion, Marek Grześ, Howard Bowman

Publication date: 23 February 2022

Published in: Neural Computation (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: 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 -- can impede application of active inference in neuroscience and AI research. This paper addresses this problem by providing a complete mathematical treatment of the active inference framework -- in discrete time and state spaces -- and the derivation of the update equations for any new model. We leverage the theoretical connection between active inference and variational message passing as describe by John Winn and Christopher M. Bishop in 2005. Since, variational message passing is a well-defined methodology for deriving Bayesian belief update equations, this paper opens the door to advanced generative models for active inference. We show that using a fully factorized variational distribution simplifies the expected free energy -- that furnishes priors over policies -- so that agents seek unambiguous states. Finally, we consider future extensions that support deep tree searches for sequential policy optimisation -- based upon structure learning and belief propagation.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.11798

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Cognitive psychology (91E10)

Cited In (3)

• Branching time active inference: the theory and its generality
• A step-by-step tutorial on active inference and its application to empirical data
• Reward Maximization Through Discrete Active Inference

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