Emotion in an active inference model of human driving

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 9 Jun 2026] Emotion in an active inference model of human driving Julian F. Schumann, Johan Engström, Ran Wei, Jens Kober, Martijn Wisse, Arkady Zgonnikov Active inference has emerged as a principled framework for modeling adaptive behavior by balancing goal-directed action with uncertainty reduction. It has been successfully applied across biological and artificial systems, including recent work on human driving. However, existing active inference models of driving have yet to address an important determinant of behavior in traffic: affective state, which significantly influences decision-making. Prior work in non-traffic domains has explored active inference agents in which emotions are represented along the axes of valence and arousal in the circumplex model. However, this work has been limited to simplified settings with discrete state spaces. In this work, we propose an expanded formulation of valence and arousal that can be extracted from a more complex active inference model of driving with continuous states. In particular, we condition affective estimates not only on the current state but also on predicted future outcomes. We evaluate the proposed approach in two interactive driving scenarios and show that the resulting emotion signals correspond to affective patterns reported in similar scenarios. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Machine Learning (cs.LG); Robotics (cs.RO) Cite as: arXiv:2608.07480 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2608.07480v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.07480 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Julian Frederik Schumann [view email] [v1] Tue, 9 Jun 2026 09:28:09 UTC (738 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-08 Change to browse by: cs cs.HC cs.LG cs.RO References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)