8 papers
Sophisticated Policies from Epistemic Priors
Wouter W. L. Nuijten, Bert de Vries
Sophisticated Inference is a variant of active inference often associated with recursive belief modeling and tree search. We argue that its central computational role is simpler: w…
What Type of Inference is Active Inference?
Wouter W. L. Nuijten, Mykola Lukashchuk, Thijs van de Laar +1
Active inference casts decision-making as inference, with the Expected Free Energy (EFE) unifying goal-directed and information-seeking behavior. Recent work showed that EFE minimi…
Reformulation Invariance and the Axiomatic Foundations of Inference
Raphaël Trésor, Thijs van de Laar, Bert de Vries
Maximum entropy, Bayesian updating, and exponential-family estimation are all instances of a common inference principle: selecting the measure or distribution that minimizes a dive…
Expected Free Energy-based Planning as Variational Inference
Wouter W. L. Nuijten, Thijs van de Laar, Bert de Vries
Planning under uncertainty requires agents to balance goal achievement with information gathering. Active inference addresses this through the Expected Free Energy (EFE), a cost fu…
Composing Non-Conjugate Factor Graphs with Closed-Form Variational Inference
Mykola Lukashchuk, Kyrylo Yemets, Wouter M. Kouw +4
Stacking probabilistic building blocks into deeper architectures typically breaks closed-form inference. We show that closed-form inference can be preserved. We identify five facto…
Active Inference for Physical AI Agents -- An Engineering Perspective
Bert de Vries
Physical AI agents, such as robots and other embodied systems operating under tight and fluctuating resource constraints, remain far less capable than biological agents in open-end…