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The paper concerns a stochastic variational approach towards mutual information maximisation with applications to reinforcement learning. The authors present a treatment of MI following a bound taken form earlier work by Barber&Agakov and using it stochastically by mini-batch descent. In order to estimate the MI they introduce a novelty and use neural networks to predict parameters for factors in state transition models as shown in Equation 6. This replaces the need for an explicit generative model of the data. The authors use this algorithm in the context of empowerment, which is a measure that can be used to connect MI with reinforcement learning.