Identifying Informative Environments for Cognition Parameter Inference via Bayesian Experimental Design
Manisha Dubey, Rimvydas Rubavicius, N. Siddharth, Subramanian Ramamoorthy
cs.AI, stat.ML
Submitted: 2026-07-30
Comments: 14 pages, 16 tables, 3 figures
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Computational cognitive modeling seeks to infer latent cognitive mechanisms underlying observed behavior.
Terminology
Abstract
Computational cognitive modeling seeks to infer latent cognitive mechanisms underlying observed behavior. Bayesian inverse planning provides a principled framework for such inference, but its success depends critically on the experimental environment. Existing approaches typically treat environments as fixed, leaving open the question of which cognitive experiments are most informative for cognition parameter inference. We formulate the design of cognitive planning experiments as a Bayesian Experimental Design (BED) problem, treating the experimental environment as the design variable. We establish an exact Monte Carlo BED benchmark and introduce an amortized Bayesian experimental design framework for efficient posterior inference and design evaluation. Experiments on the Mouselab-MDP process-tracing paradigm show that amortized BED closely matches the environment rankings of exact Monte Carlo BED while substantially reducing computational cost. We further show that no single environment is uniformly optimal across cognitive inference objectives, revealing trade-offs between expected information gain, posterior recoverability, and information efficiency. These results provide a principled framework for designing informative cognitive experiments for Bayesian parameter inference.
Sources
- Active Inference with People: a general approach to real-time adaptive experiments
- Towards Machine Theory of Mind with Large Language Model-Augmented Inverse Planning
- Closing the Loop to Discover Psychological Theories with an Automated Cognitive Scientist
- Amortized Bayesian Inference for Models of Cognition
- Assessing Adaptive World Models in Machines with Novel Games
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