On efficient computation in active inference
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Biological agents demonstrate a remarkable proficiency in calibrating appropriate scales of planning and evaluation when interacting with their environments. It follows logically that any decision-making algorithm aspiring to neurobiological plausibility must mirror these attributes, particularly regarding computational expenditure and the intricacy of evaluative processes. However, active inference encounters notable challenges in simulating apt behaviours within complex environments. These stem chiefly from its substantial computational demands and the intricate task of defining the agent’s behaviour preference. We address these through a two-fold approach. First, we introduce a planning algorithm by using the Bellman-optimality principle to minimise the planning cost function (i.e., expected free energy). Briefly, we recursively compute the expected free energy of actions in reverse temporal sequence to significantly reduce the computational complexity. Secondly, inspired by the Z-learning algorithm, we propose a novel method to learn time-constrained agent preferences. We face-validate the efficacy of these through grid-world simulations and demonstrate precise model learning and planning, even under uncertainty. These algorithmic advances create new opportunities for various applications—in neuroscience and machine learning.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it