Definition
Empowerment () is defined as the channel capacity () of the actuation channel of the agent, and is formalised as the maximal possible information flow between the actions of the agent and the effect of those actions some time later. Empowerment can be thought of as the future potential of the agent to affect its environment, as measured by its sensors. The unit of empowerment depends on the logarithm base. Base 2 is commonly used in which case the unit isContextual Empowerment
In general the choice of action (action distribution) that maximises empowerment varies from state to state. Knowing the empowerment of an agent in a specific state is useful, for example to construct an empowerment maximising policy. State-specific empowerment can be found using the more general formalism for 'contextual empowerment'. is a random variable describing the context (e.g. state).References
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