Two Routes to Interoceptive Prioritisation: Dissociating Likelihood Precision and Preference Reweighting in Active Inference

Biological systems must regulate competing needs under limited perceptual bandwidth, where sharpening one estimate costs the capacity to sharpen the others. Any fixed-budget system therefore has to decide where to allocate its perceptual precision. We study this in a foraging agent that must keep several bodily needs satisfied to survive, modelled with active inference. At each step it reads its own body-state beliefs, identifies the most-needed channel, and reallocates a fixed budget of interoceptive precision toward it, so that the same precision-shaped likelihood feeds both belief update and planning. In AffectWorld, a four-channel foraging gridworld, this selective allocation more than doubles learning-phase survival at matched budget against a uniform-precision agent ($0.414$ vs $0.199$ across 11 layouts, $n{=}32$ seeds each, paired cluster-bootstrap $p \leq 10^{-4}$). Two further results sharpen the mechanism. The benefit runs through planning as well as perception, since denying the shaped likelihood to the planner alone removes about half of it. It is also need-aligned, since aiming precision at the least-needed channel does worse than spreading it evenly. The attended channel additionally learns its own dynamics about twice as fast, and stays ahead even at matched observation count, a behavioural trace of the same precision routing, visible in learning speed, not survival.

Intrinsic motivation plays a central role in adaptive and goal-directed behavior by conferring agents reward-independent objectives and biases useful to act in noisy and uncertain environments. Active Inference addresses the problem of acting in a partially observable environment through a principled framework for belief updating and action selection. A key component of Active Inference is the specification of prior preferences, which shapes behavior by encoding desirable future outcomes. An intrinsic motivation approach called the Maximum Occupancy Principle (MOP) proposes that agents act so as to maximize occupancy over future paths of states and actions, with no preferences or epistemic targets. Despite its simple formulation, MOP gives rise to rich and adaptive behaviors that combine exploratory variability with goal-directed dynamics. In this work, we extend MOP to partially observable environments and introduce a Bellman reformulation of the Expected Free Energy for Active Inference, both incorporating belief-based inference over hidden states as part of the agent state. The Bellman formulation enables tractable offline computation via value iteration over the full belief-state space. We compare the resulting behaviors in a set of minimal experimental settings with uncertain food sources. We find that MOP agents switch between goal-directed (food seeking) behavior and exploration between different food sources, depending on their energy available and their belief state. In contrast, Active Inference agents mostly inhabit regions around a single food source, a strategy having both high pragmatic and epistemic value. We finally compare with Empowerment, which is shown to be qualitatively similar to Active Inference.

Reward learning typically assumes the human's input covers everything that matters for the task. In practice, humans can only attend to so much at once, so their teaching naturally captures some features---or aspects of the task---better than others. Prior work has shown how the robot can identify which features were poorly supervised directly from its teaching data. But the current solution is to ask the human to try again, putting the burden on someone who already struggled to convey those features. We propose shifting this burden to the robot. Our key insight is that the same information that tells the robot what it doesn't know can help it ask better questions. Preference queries offer a low-effort channel for resolving this uncertainty, but only if the robot knows where to direct them and the human knows what to attend to when answering. We act on this insight in two ways: we build an informed prior that targets preference queries at the features that need resolving, and we accompany each query with an explanation that focuses the human's attention on exactly those features. In simulation, the informed prior beats the standard active preference learning baseline by up to $30.8\%$ in the low-query regime, where reducing human effort matters most. In a user study, the informed prior and explanations each significantly improve reward recovery and amplify each other.