The Two Kinds of Free Energy and the Bayesian Revolution

04/24/2020
by   Sebastian Gottwald, et al.
0

The concept of free energy has its origins in 19th century thermodynamics, but has recently found its way into the behavioral and neural sciences, where it has been promoted for its wide applicability and has even been suggested as a fundamental principle of understanding intelligent behavior and brain function. We argue that there are essentially two different notions of free energy in current models of intelligent agency, that can both be considered as applications of Bayesian inference to the problem of action selection: one that appears when trading off accuracy and uncertainty based on a general maximum entropy principle, and one that formulates action selection in terms of minimizing an error measure that quantifies deviations of beliefs and policies from given reference models. The first approach provides a normative rule for action selection in the face of model uncertainty or when information-processing capabilities are limited. The second approach directly aims to formulate the action selection problem as an inference problem in the context of Bayesian brain theories, also known as Active Inference in the literature. We elucidate the main ideas and discuss critical technical and conceptual issues revolving around these two notions of free energy that both claim to apply at all levels of decision-making, from the high-level deliberation of reasoning down to the low-level information-processing of perception.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
11/20/2021

Kalman filters as the steady-state solution of gradient descent on variational free energy

The Kalman filter is an algorithm for the estimation of hidden variables...
research
04/17/2019

Bayesian policy selection using active inference

Learning to take actions based on observations is a core requirement for...
research
01/30/2013

Measure Selection: Notions of Rationality and Representation Independence

We take another look at the general problem of selecting a preferred pro...
research
07/20/2022

The Free Energy Principle drives neuromorphic development

We show how any system with morphological degrees of freedom and locally...
research
12/10/2021

Towards autonomous artificial agents with an active self: modeling sense of control in situated action

In this paper we present a computational modeling account of an active s...
research
03/23/2022

Reclaiming saliency: rhythmic precision-modulated action and perception

Computational models of visual attention in artificial intelligence and ...
research
11/25/2020

Free Energy Minimization: A Unified Framework for Modelling, Inference, Learning,and Optimization

The goal of these lecture notes is to review the problem of free energy ...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset