Invited Talk - Benjamin Eysenbach & Catherine (Cathy) Ji: The Geometry of Empowerment

Empowerment measures an agent’s ability to actively control its environment. Appealing as an information theoretic quantity, empowerment is often juxtaposed with more geometric approaches to exploration, such as those that build a 3D model of the world. In this talk, we link empowerment and geometry, answering a longstanding open question on the connections between empowerment and centrality. Our results provide a new perspective on what it means for agents to build a geometric model of the world, a perspective that centers affordances over 3D structure.