Extending the Entropic Potential of Events for Uncertainty Quantification and Decision-Making in Artificial Intelligence

TL;DR

This paper introduces the entropic potential of events as a novel measure to improve uncertainty quantification, decision-making, and interpretability in AI systems, inspired by physics principles.

Contribution

It adapts the entropic potential concept from physics to AI, formalizing event-centric uncertainty measures and demonstrating their application across various AI tasks.

Findings

Enhances uncertainty modeling in AI systems.

Applicable to reinforcement learning, Bayesian inference, and anomaly detection.

Provides a unified framework for uncertainty quantification.

Abstract

This work demonstrates how the concept of the entropic potential of events -- a parameter quantifying the influence of discrete events on the expected future entropy of a system -- can enhance uncertainty quantification, decision-making, and interpretability in artificial intelligence (AI). Building on its original formulation in physics, the framework is adapted for AI by introducing an event-centric measure that captures how actions, observations, or other discrete occurrences impact uncertainty at future time horizons. Both the original and AI-adjusted definitions of entropic potential are formalized, with the latter emphasizing conditional expectations to account for counterfactual scenarios. Applications are explored in policy evaluation, intrinsic reward design, explainable AI, and anomaly detection, highlighting the metric's potential to unify and strengthen uncertainty modeling in intelligent systems. Conceptual examples illustrate its use in reinforcement learning, Bayesian inference, and anomaly detection, while practical considerations for computation in complex AI models are discussed. The entropic potential framework offers a theoretically grounded, interpretable, and versatile approach to managing uncertainty in AI, bridging principles from thermodynamics, information theory, and machine learning.