Expected Free Energy-based Planning as Variational Inference

arXiv:2606.20658v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Planning under uncertainty requires agents to balance goal achievement with information gathering. Active inference addresses this through the Expected Free Energy (EFE), a cost function that unifies instrumental and epistemic objectives. However, existing EFE-based methods typically employ specialized optimization procedures that are difficult to extend or analyze. In this paper, we show that EFE-based planning can be formulated as Variational Fre...