Exploratory Experience Shapes the Geometry of Predictive Representations

Active sensing links behavior and learning through an action-perception loop: actions determine the observations used to update internal predictive models of perception, which subsequently guide the next actions. Predictive-coding frameworks provide a natural way to model this process, since internal representations are continuously updated to predict future observations. Here, we ask how exploratory and exploitative behavioral strategies shape these internal predictive representations. We build an online learning agent in a tree-like maze with a controllable parameter regulating the balance between exploratory and exploitative regimes. The agent updates a predictive-coding-based perception model from experience generated by its own behavior. The model predicts both future maze states and reward probability, allowing the agent to select actions either by expected information gain during exploration or by predicted reward during exploitation. We show that the resulting internal predictive representations depend strongly on the agent's behavioral regime. Exploratory agents develop representations that are more spatially organized and better preserve the structure of maze transitions in latent space. In contrast, exploitative agents learn less organized representations. We then train this predictive model on natural trajectories of water-deprived mice navigating the same maze and compare the resulting representations with those learned from agent trajectories. More exploratory mice show representational geometries that closely match those of exploratory agents, whereas mice with more restricted visitation patterns resemble reward-driven, exploitative agents. Together, these findings suggest that exploration enables predictive models to form generalized internal representations by organizing latent space around both spatial location and transition context in artificial agents and animals.

Active Sensing with Predictive Coding and Uncertainty Minimization

We present an end-to-end procedure for embodied exploration based on two biologically inspired computations: predictive coding and uncertainty minimization. The procedure can be applied to any exploration setting in a task-independent and intrinsically driven manner. We first demonstrate our approach in a maze navigation task and show that our model is capable of discovering the underlying transition distribution and reconstructing the spatial features of the environment. Second, we apply our model to the more complex task of active vision, where an agent must actively sample its visual environment to gather information. We show that our model is able to build unsupervised representations that allow it to actively sample and efficiently categorize sensory scenes. We further show that using these representations as input for downstream classification leads to superior data efficiency and learning speed compared to other baselines, while also maintaining lower parameter complexity. Finally, the modularity of our model allows us to analyze its internal mechanisms and to draw insight into the interactions between perception and action during exploratory behavior.