Expected free energy as an information constraint on the Bethe Lagrangian
Active inference selects actions by minimising an expected free energy functional over predicted futures. However, adding an expectation over yet-unobserved outcomes means the free energy functional no longer has a Kullback-Leibler structure, which hinders message passing treatments of inference procedures. We propose an alternative formulation based on a Bethe free energy functional, fully supporting inference by message passing. The epistemic drive is maintained by imposing an information constraint, next to normalisation, marginalisation and form constraints, insisting that the mutual information between future observations, states and parameters given actions must be at least as large...
| Authors | Wouter M. Kouw |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.IT |
| Published | 17 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 17 August 2026 |
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