ArticleFrontiers in systems neuroscience2021
Understanding, Explanation, and Active Inference.
Article in Frontiers in systems neuroscience, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
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Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Chaotic Itinerancy in Collective Behaviour Emerging from Active Inference: A Multi-Agent Model of Trust and Empowerment Dynamics in Theatre Workshops.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Agentic Finance: An Adaptive Inference Framework for Bounded-Rational Investing Agents.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Mindsets impact training adaptation and high-pressure performance: beliefs and perceptions of professionals working in elite sport and mission critical teams.Frontiers in sports and active living · 2026Article
- The active construction of past episodes.Translational neuroscience · 2026Article
- How do inner screens enable imaginative experience? Applying the free-energy principle directly to the study of conscious experience.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- Unique models of embodied cognition and eco-social niches proposed to validate hypothesis of social attunement and mis-attunement with a focus on autism.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2025Article
- Formalizing Lacanian psychoanalysis through the free energy principle.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Generative models for sequential dynamics in active inference.Cognitive neurodynamics · 2024Review
- Active inference goes to school: the importance of active learning in the age of large language models.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Forgetting ourselves in flow: an active inference account of flow states and how we experience ourselves within them.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Incremental Learning of Goal-Directed Actions in a Dynamic Environment by a Robot Using Active Inference.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Cognitive effort and active inference.Neuropsychologia · 2023Article
- First Organoid Intelligence (OI) workshop to form an OI community.Frontiers in artificial intelligence · 2023Review
- Reclaiming saliency: Rhythmic precision-modulated action and perception.Frontiers in neurorobotics · 2022Article
- The Active Inference Model of Coherence Therapy.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
While machine learning techniques have been transformative in solving a range of problems, an important challenge is to understand why they arrive at the decisions they output. Some have argued that this necessitates augmenting machine intelligence with understanding such that, when queried, a machine is able to explain its behaviour (i.e., explainable AI). In this article, we address the issue of machine understanding from the perspective of active inference. This paradigm enables decision making based upon a model of how data are generated. The generative model contains those variables required to explain sensory data, and its inversion may be seen as an attempt to explain the causes of these data. Here we are interested in explanations of one's own actions. This implies a deep generative model that includes a model of the world, used to infer policies, and a higher-level model that attempts to predict which policies will be selected based upon a space of hypothetical (i.e., counterfactual) explanations-and which can subsequently be used to provide (retrospective) explanations about the policies pursued. We illustrate the construct validity of this notion of understanding in relation to human understanding by highlighting the similarities in computational architecture and the consequences of its dysfunction.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.