Information-Theoretic Bounded Rationality

Understand

Bounded rationality, that is, decision-making and planning under resource limitations, is widely regarded as an important open problem in artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning, computational neuroscience and economics.

• This paper offers a consolidated presentation of a theory of bounded rationality based on information-theoretic ideas.
• We provide a conceptual justification for using the free energy functional as the objective function for characterizing bounded-rational decisions.
• This functional possesses three crucial properties: it controls the size of the solution space; it has Monte Carlo planners that are exact, yet bypass the need for exhaustive search; and it captures model uncertainty arising from lack of evidence or from interacting with other agents having unknown intentions.