arXiv AI By Mohamed Ayman Mohamed, Harshil Kotamreddy, Marcos Menon Jose

Self-Referenced Social Preferences: Cooperation without Observing Others Rewards

Read the original on arXiv AI →

The paper introduces self‑referenced social preferences, allowing agents to learn cooperative behavior without observing others’ private rewards. Each agent models its own reward, applies this model to observed transitions of other agents, and uses the resulting assessments to inform either the learning reward or policy updates. Experiments on three social‑dilemma environments show that agents can achieve cooperation and more equitable outcomes even when independent learners fail, with the best integration point depending on the type of social preference used.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

Integrated Altruistic and Fairness Preference Induces Advanced Mutual Cooperation in Sequential Social Dilemmas

arXiv:2607. 04710v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Inducing cooperation among distributed agents is still a difficult problem in the field of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), particularly in social dilemma situations.

By Yu Wei, Yukiko Ogura, Yoshiyuki Ohmura, Ildefons Magrans de Abril, Hoshinori Kanazawa, Yasuo Kuniyoshi
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 6

Integrated Altruistic and Fairness Preference Induces Advanced Mutual Cooperation in Sequential Social Dilemmas

Inducing cooperation among distributed agents is still a difficult problem in the field of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), particularly in social dilemma situations. There, individual interests are misaligned with the common good and individual rationality leads to suboptimal group outcomes.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

CoopEval: Benchmarking Cooperation-Sustaining Mechanisms and LLM Agents in Social Dilemmas

arXiv:2604. 15267v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: It is increasingly important that LLM agents interact effectively and safely with other goal-pursuing agents, yet, recent works report the opposite trend: LLMs with stronger reasoning capabilities behave _less_ cooperatively in mixed-motive games such as the prisoner's dilemma and public goods settings.

By Emanuel Tewolde, Xiao Zhang, David Guzman Piedrahita, Vincent Conitzer, Zhijing Jin
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Shared Actors Need Not Share Critics: Effects of Value Mismatch in Parallel Reinforcement Learning

The paper investigates the problem of sharing a single critic across multiple parallel environments in reinforcement learning. It shows that when environments assign different expected returns to the same state, a shared critic must reconcile conflicting value targets, which can distort advantage estimates and misguide policy updates. The authors propose a simple fix—providing the critic with the environment index—demonstrating through bandit models and experiments on CartPole, MuJoCo, BipedalWalker, and 16 Procgen games that this conditional critic stabilizes learning and boosts returns, achieving a 40.8% improvement in aggregate normalized return on unseen levels.

By Zhenya Liu, Yang Meng, Zhuokai Zhao, Xuefeng Liu, Yuxin Chen