[atschantz]

There is a large overlap, for instance, the popular VIME exploration algorithm [1] uses part of the free energy objective function.

However, free energy isn't a theory of curiosity per se, its posed as description of self-organisation. It just so happens that you can express the free energy functional in terms of epistemic (curious) and instrumental (reward) components.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1605.09674

[snrji]

Excuse me, another followup question (can't edit on mobile): can you ELI5 how do exploitation and exploration "emerge" naturally instead of the tradeoff being explicitly coded as in RL?

[snrji]

I see, thanks. Is any AI research center/company trying to model this idea, instead of applying RL?