Active Inference As A Model Of Agency

Abstract

Is there a canonical way to think of agency beyond reward maximisation? In this paper, we show that any type of behaviour complying with physically sound assumptions about how macroscopic biological agents interact with the world canonically integrates exploration and exploitation in the sense of minimising risk and ambiguity about states of the world. This description, known as active inference, refines the free energy principle, a popular descriptive framework for action and perception originating in neuroscience. Active inference provides a normative Bayesian framework to simulate and model agency that is widely used in behavioural neuroscience, reinforcement learning (RL) and robotics. The usefulness of active inference for RL is three-fold. *a*) Active inference provides a principled solution to the exploration-exploitation dilemma that usefully simulates biological agency. *b*) It provides an explainable recipe to simulate behaviour, whence behaviour follows as an explainable mix

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