Multimodal and Multifactor Branching Time Active Inference

Active inference is a state-of-the-art framework for modeling the brain that explains a wide range of mechanisms. Recently, two versions of branching time active inference (BTAI) have been developed to handle the exponential (space and time) complexity class that occurs when computing the prior over all possible policies up to the time horizon. However, those two versions of BTAI still suffer from an exponential complexity class with regard to the number of observed and latent variables being modeled. We resolve this limitation by allowing each observation to have its own likelihood mapping and each latent variable to have its own transition mapping. The implicit mean field approximation was tested in terms of its efficiency and computational cost using a dSprites environment in which the metadata of the dSprites data set was used as input to the model. In this setting, earlier implementations of branching time active inference (namely, BTAI_VMP and BTAI_BF) under-performed in relation to the mean field approximation (BTAI_3MF) in terms of performance and computational efficiency. Specifically, BTAI_VMP was able to solve 96.9% of the task in 5.1 seconds, and BTAI_BF was able to solve 98.6% of the task in 17.5 seconds. Our new approach outperformed both of its predecessors by solving the task completely (100%) in only 2.559 seconds.