Empathic Coupling of Homeostatic States for Intrinsic Prosociality

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Yoshida, Naoto, Man, Kingson
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Yoshida, Naoto
Man, Kingson
author_facet Yoshida, Naoto
Man, Kingson
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_12103
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Empathic Coupling of Homeostatic States for Intrinsic Prosociality
Yoshida, Naoto
Man, Kingson
Multiagent Systems
Artificial Intelligence
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
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.
title Empathic Coupling of Homeostatic States for Intrinsic Prosociality
topic Multiagent Systems
Artificial Intelligence
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.12103