Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST) artwork

#033 Prof. Karl Friston - The Free Energy Principle

Machine Learning Street Talk (MLST)

English - December 13, 2020 20:58 - 1 hour - 103 MB
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Previous Episode: #032- Simon Kornblith / GoogleAI - SimCLR and Paper Haul!
Next Episode: #034 Eray Özkural- AGI, Simulations & Safety

This week Dr. Tim Scarfe, Dr. Keith Duggar and Connor Leahy chat with Prof. Karl Friston. Professor Friston is a British neuroscientist at University College London and an authority on brain imaging. In 2016 he was ranked the most influential neuroscientist on Semantic Scholar.  His main contribution to theoretical neurobiology is the variational Free energy principle, also known as active inference in the Bayesian brain. The FEP is a formal statement that the existential imperative for any system which survives in the changing world can be cast as an inference problem. Bayesian Brain Hypothesis states that the brain is confronted with ambiguous sensory evidence, which it interprets by making inferences about the hidden states which caused the sensory data. So is the brain an inference engine? The key concept separating Friston's idea from traditional stochastic reinforcement learning methods and even Bayesian reinforcement learning is moving away from goal-directed optimisation.




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00:00:00 Show teaser intro 


00:16:24 Main formalism for FEP 


00:28:29 Path Integral 


00:30:52 How did we feel talking to friston? 


00:34:06 Skit - on cultures (checked, but maybe make shorter) 


00:36:02 Friston joins 


00:36:33 Main show introduction 


00:40:51 Is prediction all it takes for intelligence? 


00:48:21 balancing accuracy with flexibility 


00:57:36 belief-free vs belief-based; beliefs are crucial  


01:04:53 Fuzzy Markov Blankets and Wandering Sets  


01:12:37 The Free Energy Principle conforms to itself  


01:14:50 useful false beliefs 


01:19:14 complexity minimization is the heart of free energy [01:19:14 ]Keith:  


01:23:25 An Alpha to tip the scales? Absoute not! Absolutely yes!  


01:28:47 FEP applied to brain anatomy  


01:36:28 Are there multiple non-FEP forms in the brain? 


01:43:11 a positive conneciton to backpropagation  


01:47:12 The FEP does not explain the origin of FEP systems  


01:49:32 Post-show banter 




https://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/


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