4 papers
Generalised Bellman recurrence and three dualities in sequential decision-making
Fernando E. Rosas, David Hyland, Daniel Polani
What gives the Bellman equation its form? We show that the recursive properties of optimal value functions follow from three conditions: that the dynamics decomposes through suffic…
Life as Plasmas: Autonomy and Interactivism in-materio
Nicolás Hinrichs, Mahault Albarracin, Felipe Engelberger +2
When is a material system a candidate for life at all? We argue that this question is prior to behavior, functional architecture, or computational capacity, and that at root it is…
Active Inference: A method for Phenotyping Agency in AI systems?
Philip Wilson, Axel Constant, Mahault Albarracin +4
The proliferation of agentic artificial intelligence has outpaced the conceptual tools needed to characterize agency in computational systems. Prevailing definitions mainly rely on…
Multi-Agent Empowerment and Emergence of Complex Behavior in Groups
Tristan Shah, Ilya Nemenman, Daniel Polani +1
Intrinsic motivations are receiving increasing attention, i.e. behavioral incentives that are not engineered, but emerge from the interaction of an agent with its surroundings. In…