Whence the Expected Free Energy?

Understand

The Expected Free Energy (EFE) is a central quantity in the theory of active inference.

• It is the quantity that all active inference agents are mandated to minimize through action, and its decomposition into extrinsic and intrinsic value terms is key to the balance of exploration and exploitation that active inference agents evince.
• Despite its importance, the mathematical origins of this quantity and its relation to the Variational Free Energy (VFE) remain unclear.
• In this paper, we investigate the origins of the EFE in detail and show that it is not simply "the free energy in the future".