Empathic Coupling of Homeostatic States for Intrinsic Prosociality
When regarding the suffering of others, we often experience personal distress and feel compelled to help. Inspired by living systems, we investigate the emergence of prosocial behavior among autonomous agents that are motivated by homeostatic self-regulation. We perform multi-agent reinforcement learning, treating each agent as a vulnerable homeostat charged with maintaining its own well-being. We introduce an empathy-like mechanism to share homeostatic states between agents: an agent can either \emph{observe} their partner's internal state (cognitive empathy) or the agent's internal state can be \emph{directly coupled} to that of their partner's (affective empathy). In three simple multi-agent environments, we show that prosocial behavior arises only under homeostatic coupling - when the distress of a partner can affect one's own well-being. Our findings specify the type and role of empathy in artificial agents capable of prosocial behavior.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
Multi-agent Reinforcement LearningSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Prosociality by Coupling, Not Mere Observation: Homeostatic Sharing in an Inspectable Recurrent Artificial Life Agent
Artificial agents can be made to ``help'' through explicit social rewards, hard-coded prosocial bonuses, or direct access to another agent's state. I isolate a narrower route: homeostatic coupling. Building on ReCoN-Ipsu…
Homeostatic Coupling for Prosocial Behavior
When regarding the suffering of others, we often experience personal distress and feel compelled to help\footnote{Preprint. Under review.}. Inspired by living systems, we investigate the emergence of prosocial behavior a…
Multi-agent Reinforcement LearningChaos in Homeostatically Regulated Neural Systems
Low-dimensional yet rich dynamics often emerge in the brain. Examples include oscillations and chaotic dynamics during sleep, epilepsy, and voluntary movement. However, a general mechanism for the emergence of low dimens…
Integrating Physiological Data with Large Language Models for Empathic Human-AI Interaction
This paper explores enhancing empathy in Large Language Models (LLMs) by integrating them with physiological data. We propose a physiological computing approach that includes developing deep learning models that use phys…
ChatbotPhysiological ComputingBiophysical models of intrinsic homeostasis: Firing rates and beyond
In view of ever-changing conditions both in the external world and in intrinsic brain states, maintaining the robustness of computations poses a challenge, adequate solutions to which we are only beginning to understand.…