{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/empowerment-an-introduction","title":"Empowerment -- an Introduction","arxiv_id":"1310.1863","date":"2013-10-07","proceeding":null,"authors":["Christoph Salge","Cornelius Glackin","Daniel Polani"],"abstract":"This book chapter is an introduction to and an overview of the\ninformation-theoretic, task independent utility function \"Empowerment\", which\nis defined as the channel capacity between an agent's actions and an agent's\nsensors. It quantifies how much influence and control an agent has over the\nworld it can perceive. This book chapter discusses the general idea behind\nempowerment as an intrinsic motivation and showcases several previous\napplications of empowerment to demonstrate how empowerment can be applied to\ndifferent sensor-motor configuration, and how the same formalism can lead to\ndifferent observed behaviors. Furthermore, we also present a fast approximation\nfor empowerment in the continuous domain.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1310.1863v2","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.1863v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"empowerment-an-introduction","repo_url":"https://github.com/AidanRocke/variational_empowerment","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok"}},{"paper_slug":"empowerment-an-introduction","repo_url":"https://github.com/Lham71/Maximising-Neural-Information-Processing","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"tf","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1310.1863","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}