Prediction and Empowerment: A Theory of Agency through Bridge Interfaces

ArXi:2605.06346v1 Announce Type: new We study agency under partial observability in deterministic physical or simulated worlds, where apparent randomness arises from uncertainty over initial conditions, fixed law bits, and unrolled exogenous noise. We model sensing and actuation as bridge interfaces split between agent-controlled parameters and environment-controlled channel state, inducing a deterministic POMDP through a prior over latent microstates and many-to-one observation coarsening. Within this framework, we prove a separation between prediction, compression, and empowerment.