arXiv:2508.17403cs.LGstat.AP2025-08

用互信息重新定义意外,让智能系统学会反思与自适应。

Mutual Information Surprise: Rethinking Unexpectedness in Autonomous Systems

  • 以互信息变化衡量意外,将意外视为知识增长信号
  • 在污染地图估计中,系统稳定性、响应速度和预测准确率显著提升
  • 适合研究自适应系统、具身智能与自主决策的学者参考

当前研究普遍认为机器可产生意外,并提出多种意外度量方法,如香农意外和贝叶斯意外。然而,何为意外及其应对策略仍存在争议。本文提出互信息意外(MIS)框架,将意外重新定义为认知增长的信号,而非异常检测指标。我们设计了一种统计测试序列以触发意外反应,并构建基于MIS的动态响应策略,通过采样调整与过程分叉控制系统行为。在合成环境与动态污染地图估计任务上的实证评估表明,采用MIS策略的系统在稳定性、响应性与预测准确性上显著优于传统方法。该方法将意外从被动反应转向主动反思,量化新观测对互信息的影响,支持学习进程的自我监控,为实现具备自我意识与自适应能力的智能系统提供新路径。我们预期该度量将在复杂动态环境中推动自主系统的学习与进化能力。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

A community of researchers appears to think that a machine can be surprised and have introduced various surprise measures, principally the Shannon Surprise and the Bayesian Surprise. The questions of what constitutes a surprise and how to react to one still elicit debates. In this work, we introduce Mutual Information Surprise (MIS), a new framework that redefines surprise not as anomaly measure, but as a signal of epistemic growth. Furthermore, we develop a statistical test sequence that could trigger a surprise reaction and propose a MIS-based reaction policy that dynamically governs system behavior through sampling adjustment and process forking. Empirical evaluations -- on both synthetic domains and a dynamic pollution map estimation task -- show that a system governed by the MIS-based reaction policy significantly outperforms those under classical surprise-based approaches in stability, responsiveness, and predictive accuracy. The important implication of our new proposal is that MIS quantifies the impact of new observations on mutual information, shifts surprise from reactive to reflective, enables reflection on learning progression, and thus offers a path toward self-aware and adaptive autonomous systems. We expect the new surprise measure to play a critical role in further advancing autonomous systems on their ability to learn and adapt in a complex and dynamic environment.

自主系统互信息自适应意外度量

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