Policy Entanglement in Active Inference

Abstract {-} Active inference models often need to choose among several policy streams at once, for example streams tied to different effectors, sensory channels, agents, agents within a group, or planning horizons. Standard discrete active-inference implementations keep this manageable by treating those streams as independent, but that simplification removes the dependencies that make coordinated action possible. This manuscript introduces policy entanglement: a controlled deformation of the usual independent policy posterior by a scalar coupling strength and explicit compatibility and preference potentials. The construction preserves the finite active inference setting while making cross-stream dependence a first-class modeling object rather than an implicit artifact of the chosen factorization. The framework keeps a claim-strength ledger that distinguishes exact recoveries, parameteri