On the Relationship Between Active Inference and Control as Inference

Understand

Active Inference (AIF) is an emerging framework in the brain sciences which suggests that biological agents act to minimise a variational bound on model evidence.

• Control-as-Inference (CAI) is a framework within reinforcement learning which casts decision making as a variational inference problem.
• While these frameworks both consider action selection through the lens of variational inference, their relationship remains unclear.
• Here, we provide a formal comparison between them and demonstrate that the primary difference arises from how value is incorporated into their respective generative models.