Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are similarities. The difference in two approaches are: - FEP is Bayesian in nature, while there's usually no notion of uncertainties in curiosity driven RL - In FEP, there's no explicit weighting of explore/exploit tradeoff. It automatically emerges from equations - FEP, since it's Bayesian, allows for more complex reasoning (like counterfactuals) - Curiosity driven RL is scalable while FEP is not feasible for…
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?
The equation for free-energy/ELBO has two terms, an energy and an entropy. You can rewrite it as "log-likelihood minus KL from prior". If you write your model in a certain way, you can then read it as, "Fit to the data, minus cost" (second formulation) or "Accuracy + exploitation + exploration" (first formulation).