AUTHOR=de Vries Bert , Friston Karl J. TITLE=A Factor Graph Description of Deep Temporal Active Inference JOURNAL=Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience VOLUME=11 YEAR=2017 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/computational-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fncom.2017.00095 DOI=10.3389/fncom.2017.00095 ISSN=1662-5188 ABSTRACT=

Active inference is a corollary of the Free Energy Principle that prescribes how self-organizing biological agents interact with their environment. The study of active inference processes relies on the definition of a generative probabilistic model and a description of how a free energy functional is minimized by neuronal message passing under that model. This paper presents a tutorial introduction to specifying active inference processes by Forney-style factor graphs (FFG). The FFG framework provides both an insightful representation of the probabilistic model and a biologically plausible inference scheme that, in principle, can be automatically executed in a computer simulation. As an illustrative example, we present an FFG for a deep temporal active inference process. The graph clearly shows how policy selection by expected free energy minimization results from free energy minimization per se, in an appropriate generative policy model.