What Type of Inference is Active Inference?
Active inference casts decision-making as inference, with the Expected Free Energy (EFE) unifying goal-directed and information-seeking behavior. Recent work showed that EFE minimization can be written as Variational Free Energy (VFE) minimization on a generative model augmented with epistemic priors. We prove that the VFE of the augmented model can be rewritten as the VFE of the predictive model plus explicit entropy-correction terms, making the EFE contribution transparent. We then show that proper EFE-based planning requires combining these epistemic corrections with a planning correction that turns marginal inference into policy optimization, yielding a full variational characterizati...
| Authors | Wouter W. L. Nuijten, Mykola Lukashchuk, Thijs van de Laar et al. |
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| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 3 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 July 2026 |
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