Variational Free Energy: Getting-Started Guide and Resource Compendium

Many of you who have followed the evolution of this variational inference discussion (over the past ten blogposts), may be wondering where to start. This would be particularly true for readers who are not necessarily familiar with the variational-anything literature, and would like to begin with the easiest, most intuitive-explanatory articles possible, and then gently… Continue reading Variational Free Energy: Getting-Started Guide and Resource Compendium

Variational Free Energy and Active Inference: Pt 3

When we left off in our last post, we’d determined that Friston (2013) and Friston et al. (2015) reversed the typical P and Q notation that was commonly used for the Kullback-Leibler divergence. Just as a refresher, we’re posting those last two images again. The following Figure 1 was originally Figure 5 in last week’s… Continue reading Variational Free Energy and Active Inference: Pt 3

Variational Free Energy and Active Inference: Pt 2

Our intention with this post is to cover not only the notion, but the notation, used by Karl Friston in his 2013 paper, “Life as We Know It.” (Actually, we’re addressing a very small notational subset – albeit one that needs to be treated with great care and caution.) To do this, we’re also discussing… Continue reading Variational Free Energy and Active Inference: Pt 2