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Hauptverfasser: Mon-Williams, Ruaridh, Taylor-Davies, Max, Mieczkowski, Elizabeth, Velez, Natalia, Bramley, Neil R., Wang, Yanwei, Griffiths, Thomas L., Lucas, Christopher G.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17323
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author Mon-Williams, Ruaridh
Taylor-Davies, Max
Mieczkowski, Elizabeth
Velez, Natalia
Bramley, Neil R.
Wang, Yanwei
Griffiths, Thomas L.
Lucas, Christopher G.
author_facet Mon-Williams, Ruaridh
Taylor-Davies, Max
Mieczkowski, Elizabeth
Velez, Natalia
Bramley, Neil R.
Wang, Yanwei
Griffiths, Thomas L.
Lucas, Christopher G.
contents Humans are remarkably adept at collaboration, able to infer the strengths and weaknesses of new partners in order to work successfully towards shared goals. To build AI systems with this capability, we must first understand its building blocks: does such flexibility require explicit, dedicated mechanisms for modelling others -- or can it emerge spontaneously from the pressures of open-ended cooperative interaction? To investigate this question, we train simple model-free RNN agents to collaborate with a population of diverse partners. Using the `Overcooked-AI' environment, we collect data from thousands of collaborative teams, and analyse agents' internal hidden states. Despite a lack of additional architectural features, inductive biases, or auxiliary objectives, the agents nevertheless develop structured internal representations of their partners' task abilities, enabling rapid adaptation and generalisation to novel collaborators. We investigated these internal models through probing techniques, and large-scale behavioural analysis. Notably, we find that structured partner modelling emerges when agents can influence partner behaviour by controlling task allocation. Our results show that partner modelling can arise spontaneously in model-free agents -- but only under environmental conditions that impose the right kind of social pressure.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_17323
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Partner Modelling Emerges in Recurrent Agents (But Only When It Matters)
Mon-Williams, Ruaridh
Taylor-Davies, Max
Mieczkowski, Elizabeth
Velez, Natalia
Bramley, Neil R.
Wang, Yanwei
Griffiths, Thomas L.
Lucas, Christopher G.
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Humans are remarkably adept at collaboration, able to infer the strengths and weaknesses of new partners in order to work successfully towards shared goals. To build AI systems with this capability, we must first understand its building blocks: does such flexibility require explicit, dedicated mechanisms for modelling others -- or can it emerge spontaneously from the pressures of open-ended cooperative interaction? To investigate this question, we train simple model-free RNN agents to collaborate with a population of diverse partners. Using the `Overcooked-AI' environment, we collect data from thousands of collaborative teams, and analyse agents' internal hidden states. Despite a lack of additional architectural features, inductive biases, or auxiliary objectives, the agents nevertheless develop structured internal representations of their partners' task abilities, enabling rapid adaptation and generalisation to novel collaborators. We investigated these internal models through probing techniques, and large-scale behavioural analysis. Notably, we find that structured partner modelling emerges when agents can influence partner behaviour by controlling task allocation. Our results show that partner modelling can arise spontaneously in model-free agents -- but only under environmental conditions that impose the right kind of social pressure.
title Partner Modelling Emerges in Recurrent Agents (But Only When It Matters)
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17323