A Collective Variational Principle Unifying Bayesian Inference, Game Theory, and Thermodynamics
Collective intelligence emerges across biological, physical, and artificial systems without central coordination, yet a unifying principle governing such behaviour remains elusive. The Free Energy Principle explains how individual agents adapt through variational inference, while game theory formalises strategic interactions. Here we introduce the Game-Theoretic Free Energy Principle, a unified framework showing that multi-agent systems performing local free-energy minimisation implicitly implement a stochastic game. We prove that, under bounded rationality and local information constraints, stationary points of collective free energy correspond to approximate Nash equilibria of an induce...
| Authors | Djamel Bouchaffra, Faycal Ykhlef, Mustapha Lebbah et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 30 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 30 April 2026 |
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