论文标题
两种自由能和贝叶斯革命
The Two Kinds of Free Energy and the Bayesian Revolution
论文作者
论文摘要
自由能的概念起源于19世纪的热力学,但最近已经进入了行为和神经科学的途径,在该行为和神经科学方面,它已被促进其广泛的适用性,甚至被认为是理解智能行为和大脑功能的基本原则。我们认为,在当前的智能代理模型中,基本上有两个不同的自由能概念,它们都可以被视为贝叶斯对行动选择问题的推断的应用:一种基于一般的最大熵原理进行准确性和不确定性进行交换时出现的,一种是根据一般的最大熵原则以及一种将行动选择以最小化信念和派行模型的差异来制定行动选择的方法。第一种方法在面对模型不确定性或信息处理功能受到限制时为行动选择提供了规范性规则。第二种方法旨在在贝叶斯大脑理论(也称为文献中的主动推论)中直接将动作选择问题作为推理问题。我们阐明了主要思想,并讨论了围绕这两个自由能源概念的关键技术和概念性问题,这些概念都声称在所有决策级别上都适用,从推理的高级审议到对感知的低级信息处理。
The concept of free energy has its origins in 19th century thermodynamics, but has recently found its way into the behavioral and neural sciences, where it has been promoted for its wide applicability and has even been suggested as a fundamental principle of understanding intelligent behavior and brain function. We argue that there are essentially two different notions of free energy in current models of intelligent agency, that can both be considered as applications of Bayesian inference to the problem of action selection: one that appears when trading off accuracy and uncertainty based on a general maximum entropy principle, and one that formulates action selection in terms of minimizing an error measure that quantifies deviations of beliefs and policies from given reference models. The first approach provides a normative rule for action selection in the face of model uncertainty or when information processing capabilities are limited. The second approach directly aims to formulate the action selection problem as an inference problem in the context of Bayesian brain theories, also known as Active Inference in the literature. We elucidate the main ideas and discuss critical technical and conceptual issues revolving around these two notions of free energy that both claim to apply at all levels of decision-making, from the high-level deliberation of reasoning down to the low-level information processing of perception.