What Type of Inference is Active Inference?

Wouter W. L. Nuijten; Mykola Lukashchuk; Thijs van de Laar; Bert de Vries

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arXiv · 2606.04935

What Type of Inference is Active Inference?

Wouter W. L. Nuijten·Mykola Lukashchuk·Thijs van de Laar·Bert de Vries

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Abstract

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 characterization of EFE-based planning. This clarifies which corrections are needed for cross-entropy planning and for full EFE-based planning. The same entropy-corrected formulation leads to a detailed message-passing scheme for EFE-based planning together with simpler ablations. Experiments on three grid-world environments show that full EFE-based planning outperforms ablations that omit either the planning correction or the epistemic corrections.

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Wouter W. L. Nuijten, Mykola Lukashchuk, Thijs van de Laar, Bert de Vries. 2026-06-03. What Type of Inference is Active Inference?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.04935

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