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free energy principle

intrinsic motivation, variational inference, probabilistic inference, statistical physics, Bayesian brain hypothesis

First heard of this in Mindscape 87 | Karl Friston on Brains, Predictions, and Free Energy * YouTube the Mindscape podcast episode interviewing Karl Friston on <2020-03-09 Mon>

Considered here as that developed by Karl Friston originally (to the best of my knowledge as of <2020-05-14 Thu>) in A theory of cortical responses by Karl Friston in 2005 and most recently in A free energy principle for a particular physics by Karl Friston in 2019

__The free energy principle tries to explain how biological systems remain in non-equilibrium steady-states by restricting themselves to a limited number of states.__ — via Free energy principle * Wikipedia

[1st International Workshop on Active Inference](https://iwaiworkshop.github.io/#) to be held <2020-09-14 Mon> with paper submission deadline <2020-06-09 Tue>.

Submissions are being accepted in LNCS overleaf format

references

Principles of the self-organizing system by W. Ross Ashby in 1962

The free energy principle for action and perception A mathematical review by Christopher Buckley, Anil Seth, et al in 2017

A tutorial on the free-energy framework for modeling perception and learning by Rafal Bogacz in 2017

Active inference on discrete state-spaces - a synthesis by Lancelot Da Costa, Thomas Parr, Karl Friston et al in 2020

Inferring what to do (and what not to) by Thomas Parr in 2020

Oleg Solopchuk – Medium

^^Comments^^

At the core of the background necessary to understand the free energy principle is the relationship between free energy as it is used in statistical physics versus its use in probabilistic inference which is encapsulated in the notion of variational inference. The best explanation I know of this relationship is in the formulation of Gibbs free energy via a variational principle in Information, physics, and computation by Marc Mezard and Andrea Montanari in 2009.

What is the relationship between the free energy principle and active inference?