Free Energy Heuristics: Fast-And-Frugal Cognition as Active Inference Under Uncertain Precision
Chain-of-thought (CoT) improves large language models' performance in math and symbolic reasoning. But on planning, contested ethics, and tasks where the model cannot check itself, more reasoning makes things worse. Both effects are documented; what has been missing is a principled account of which property decides the outcome. We argue it is meta-uncertainty: how unsure the model is about the reliability of its own evidence. When that uncertainty is high, extra reasoning stops adding signal and starts manufacturing false confidence. We prove that the policy minimizing expected free energy under uncertain precision stops integrating cues after a finite number of high-validity ones when th...
| Authors | Alex Bogdan |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 14 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 June 2026 |
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