arXiv:2504.14898stat.MLcs.LG2025-04被引 10

用变分推断统一规划中的目标达成与信息获取,解决不确定性下的决策问题。

Expected Free Energy-based Planning as Variational Inference

  • 将规划建模为变分推断,通过最小化变分自由能实现
  • 生成模型引入偏好和认知先验,自然导出期望自由能规划
  • 兼顾目标达成与信息增益,适合资源受限的智能体

我们研究不确定性下的规划问题,要求智能体在实现目标的同时减少不确定性。传统方法常将探索与利用分开处理,缺乏统一的推断基础。主动推断基于自由能原理,通过最小化期望自由能(EFE)来整合效用与认知驱动(如消除模糊性、追求新奇)。但EFE最小化的计算开销一直是其可扩展性的主要障碍。本文表明,基于EFE的规划可自然地从对带有偏好和认知先验的生成模型进行变分自由能最小化中导出。这一结果强化了与自由能原理的理论一致性,将不确定性下的规划本身视为一种变分推断。该框架生成的策略同时支持目标达成与信息增益,并包含考虑有限计算资源的复杂度项。该统一框架连接并扩展了现有方法,使主动推断智能体具备可扩展、资源感知的实现可能。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

We address the problem of planning under uncertainty, where an agent must choose actions that not only achieve desired outcomes but also reduce uncertainty. Traditional methods often treat exploration and exploitation as separate objectives, lacking a unified inferential foundation. Active inference, grounded in the Free Energy Principle, provides such a foundation by minimizing Expected Free Energy (EFE), a cost function that combines utility with epistemic drives, such as ambiguity resolution and novelty seeking. However, the computational burden of EFE minimization had remained a significant obstacle to its scalability. In this paper, we show that EFE-based planning arises naturally from minimizing a variational free energy functional on a generative model augmented with preference and epistemic priors. This result reinforces theoretical consistency with the Free Energy Principle by casting planning under uncertainty itself as a form of variational inference. Our formulation yields policies that jointly support goal achievement and information gain, while incorporating a complexity term that accounts for bounded computational resources. This unifying framework connects and extends existing methods, enabling scalable, resource-aware implementations of active inference agents.

主动推断规划变分推断不确定性

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