Emergent Reciprocity and Team Formation from Randomized Uncertain Social Preferences
Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown recent success in increasingly complex fixed-team zero-sum environments. However, the real world is not zero-sum nor does it have fixed teams; humans face numerous social dilemmas and must learn when to cooperate and when to compete. To successfully deploy agents into the human world, it may be important that they be able to understand and help in our conflicts. Unfortunately, selfish MARL agents typically fail when faced with social dilemmas. In this work, we show evidence of emergent direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity and reputation, and team formation when training agents with randomized uncertain social preferences (RUSP), a novel environment augmentation that expands the distribution of environments agents play in. RUSP is generic and scalable; it can be applied to any multi-agent environment without changing the original underlying game dynamics or objectives. In particular, we show that with RUSP these behaviors can emerge and lead to higher social welfare equilibria in both classic abstract social dilemmas like Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma as well in more complex intertemporal environments.
Code (1)
Tasks
Multi-agent Reinforcement LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Strategic formation of collaborative networks
We examine behavior in an experimental collaboration game that incorporates endogenous network formation. The environment is modeled as a generalization of the voluntary contributions mechanism. By varying the informatio…
counterfactualOptimal Robust Contract Design
We consider the robust contract design problem when the principal only has limited information about the actions the agent can take. The principal evaluates a contract according to its worst-case performance caused by th…
Interpretable Learned Emergent Communication for Human-Agent Teams
Learning interpretable communication is essential for multi-agent and human-agent teams (HATs). In multi-agent reinforcement learning for partially-observable environments, agents may convey information to others via lea…
Multi-agent Reinforcement LearningSTEAM: A Training-Free Congestion-Aware Enhancement Framework for Decentralized Multi-Agent Path Finding
We propose STEAM (Spatial, Temporal, and Emergent congestion Awareness for MAPF), a training-free test-time enhancement framework for learning-based decentralized Multi-Agent Path Finding (MAPF) in discrete environments.…
Learning to Make Friends: Coaching LLM Agents toward Emergent Social Ties
Can large language model (LLM) agents reproduce the complex social dynamics that characterize human online behavior -- shaped by homophily, reciprocity, and social validation -- and what memory and learning mechanisms en…