April 2025 Newsletter 🐧📒🐢 Active Inference Institute

Here is the entry point for 2025, giving ways to get involved with ongoing activities at the Institute and Ecosystem this year.

Do you have any updates from your projects or research from the Active Inference Ecosystem? Complete a measurement form and we may include it in a future newsletter.

Updates from Institute Projects

• The Textbook Group reports: Activity for this interval completed in April, with Cohort 7 finishing the book (all recordings viewable here) and Cohort 8 completing the first five chapters. Registration is open, and we will follow up with registrants when closer to beginning the next phase.
• During May 2025, we will begin a 4 week phase of multi-agent systems design, followed by a supported implementation phase in June. Meetings will be twice-weekly (Tuesdays at 16 UTC and Wednesdays at 19 UTC at this link). This project and phase is open for all participants and backgrounds. So if you have interest in developing your own multi-agent system, or just want to connect/share/learn/upskill, join these activities and follow along in the notes!
• The Theoretical Neurobiology (TNB) Group meetings continue. Information on how to join these weekly meetings can be found at the project page.
• Some of highlight livestreams from the last month included:
• GuestStream #101.1 with Mohsen Jafari and Yulin Li on Navigating Autonomous Vehicle on Unmarked Roads with Diffusion-Based Motion Prediction and Active Inference
• GuestStream #102.1 with Majid D Beni on Scientific Explanation, Causality, and Agency A Free Energy Account
• GuestStream #104.1 with Tadahiro Taniguchi on Collective Predictive Coding and Active Inference: A New Perspective on Emergent Communication
• ModelStream #018.1 with Giovanni Russo, Hozefa Jesawada, Karl J Friston on Robust Decision-Making Via Free Energy Minimization
• MathStream #012.1 with Ola Rønning on ELBOing Stein: Variational Bayes with Stein Mixture Inference

Updates from Ecosystem Projects

• Sanjeev Namjoshi has released an open source repo for finding and curating literature related to Active Inference: https://github.com/snamjoshi/aif-fep-db . For those who might be interested in continuing to build on this literature analysis framework at the Institute, get in touch!
• Christo Thomas is beginning a research group at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, with the mission to push the boundaries of next-generation computing and communication systems through trustworthy and resilient AI, with a strong emphasis on network optimization and cybersecurity. They are seeking applications for PhD students in 2025-2026, with background in AI, wireless communication, mathematical optimization or Bayesian inference. Please see here for more information.
• From the Hierarchical Active Inference for Autonomous Drone Navigation in Microsoft AirSim with Environmentally Aware Adaptive Planning project, Harshil Shah and Satyaki Maitra report: We are developing and testing a hierarchical active inference framework for autonomous drone navigation in Microsoft AirSim. The agent infers a latent suitability state, based on obstacle distance and density, from multimodal sensor input. It then filters unsafe candidate waypoints before selecting adaptive policies via expected free energy (EFE) and suitability. We have conducted a successful test flight. Our current focus on measurement is validating this approach across different environments and designing an experiment to collect data. Our system integrates Julia (inference and planning) with Python-based AirSim control using ZeroMQ for real-time communication. More details and the code are available here.

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