Sophisticated Inference

Understand

Active inference offers a first principle account of sentient behaviour, from which special and important cases can be derived, e.g., reinforcement learning, active learning, Bayes optimal inference, Bayes optimal design, etc.

• Active inference resolves the exploitation-exploration dilemma in relation to prior preferences, by placing information gain on the same footing as reward or value.
• In brief, active inference replaces value functions with functionals of (Bayesian) beliefs, in the form of an expected (variational) free energy.
• In this paper, we consider a sophisticated kind of active inference, using a recursive form of expected free energy.