Goal-Directed Planning for Habituated Agents by Active Inference Using a Variational Recurrent Neural Network

It is crucial to ask how agents can achieve goals by generating action plans using only partial models of the world acquired through habituated sensory-motor experiences. Although many existing robotics studies use a forward model framework, there are generalization issues with high degrees of freed...

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Main Authors: Takazumi Matsumoto, Jun Tani
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2020-05-01
Series:Entropy
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/22/5/564
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author Takazumi Matsumoto
Jun Tani
author_facet Takazumi Matsumoto
Jun Tani
author_sort Takazumi Matsumoto
collection DOAJ
description It is crucial to ask how agents can achieve goals by generating action plans using only partial models of the world acquired through habituated sensory-motor experiences. Although many existing robotics studies use a forward model framework, there are generalization issues with high degrees of freedom. The current study shows that the predictive coding (PC) and active inference (AIF) frameworks, which employ a generative model, can develop better generalization by learning a prior distribution in a low dimensional latent state space representing probabilistic structures extracted from well habituated sensory-motor trajectories. In our proposed model, learning is carried out by inferring optimal latent variables as well as synaptic weights for maximizing the evidence lower bound, while goal-directed planning is accomplished by inferring latent variables for maximizing the estimated lower bound. Our proposed model was evaluated with both simple and complex robotic tasks in simulation, which demonstrated sufficient generalization in learning with limited training data by setting an intermediate value for a regularization coefficient. Furthermore, comparative simulation results show that the proposed model outperforms a conventional forward model in goal-directed planning, due to the learned prior confining the search of motor plans within the range of habituated trajectories.
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spelling doaj.art-804ab67f10bc425b945a03a2b480b0b52023-11-20T00:52:29ZengMDPI AGEntropy1099-43002020-05-0122556410.3390/e22050564Goal-Directed Planning for Habituated Agents by Active Inference Using a Variational Recurrent Neural NetworkTakazumi Matsumoto0Jun Tani1Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Okinawa 904-0495, JapanOkinawa Institute of Science and Technology, Okinawa 904-0495, JapanIt is crucial to ask how agents can achieve goals by generating action plans using only partial models of the world acquired through habituated sensory-motor experiences. Although many existing robotics studies use a forward model framework, there are generalization issues with high degrees of freedom. The current study shows that the predictive coding (PC) and active inference (AIF) frameworks, which employ a generative model, can develop better generalization by learning a prior distribution in a low dimensional latent state space representing probabilistic structures extracted from well habituated sensory-motor trajectories. In our proposed model, learning is carried out by inferring optimal latent variables as well as synaptic weights for maximizing the evidence lower bound, while goal-directed planning is accomplished by inferring latent variables for maximizing the estimated lower bound. Our proposed model was evaluated with both simple and complex robotic tasks in simulation, which demonstrated sufficient generalization in learning with limited training data by setting an intermediate value for a regularization coefficient. Furthermore, comparative simulation results show that the proposed model outperforms a conventional forward model in goal-directed planning, due to the learned prior confining the search of motor plans within the range of habituated trajectories.https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/22/5/564goal directed planningactive inferencepredictive codingvariational bayesrecurrent neural network
spellingShingle Takazumi Matsumoto
Jun Tani
Goal-Directed Planning for Habituated Agents by Active Inference Using a Variational Recurrent Neural Network
Entropy
goal directed planning
active inference
predictive coding
variational bayes
recurrent neural network
title Goal-Directed Planning for Habituated Agents by Active Inference Using a Variational Recurrent Neural Network
title_full Goal-Directed Planning for Habituated Agents by Active Inference Using a Variational Recurrent Neural Network
title_fullStr Goal-Directed Planning for Habituated Agents by Active Inference Using a Variational Recurrent Neural Network
title_full_unstemmed Goal-Directed Planning for Habituated Agents by Active Inference Using a Variational Recurrent Neural Network
title_short Goal-Directed Planning for Habituated Agents by Active Inference Using a Variational Recurrent Neural Network
title_sort goal directed planning for habituated agents by active inference using a variational recurrent neural network
topic goal directed planning
active inference
predictive coding
variational bayes
recurrent neural network
url https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/22/5/564
work_keys_str_mv AT takazumimatsumoto goaldirectedplanningforhabituatedagentsbyactiveinferenceusingavariationalrecurrentneuralnetwork
AT juntani goaldirectedplanningforhabituatedagentsbyactiveinferenceusingavariationalrecurrentneuralnetwork