Adaptive Learning Agents workshop at AAMAS

Abstract

Social learning helps humans and animals rapidly adapt to new circumstances, coordinate with others, and drives the emergence of complex learned behaviors. What if it could do the same for AI? This talk describes how Social Reinforcement Learning in multi-agent and human-AI interactions can address fundamental issues in AI such as learning and generalization, while improving social abilities like coordination. I propose a unified method for improving coordination and communication based on causal social influence. I then demonstrate that multi-agent training can be a useful tool for improving learning and generalization. I present PAIRED, in which an adversary learns to construct training environments to maximize regret between a pair of learners, leading to the generation of a complex curriculum of environments. Agents trained with PAIRED generalize more than 20x better to unknown test environments. Finally, I demonstrate the value of learning socially from other agents, whether those agents are AI or humans. Together, this work argues that Social RL is a valuable approach for developing more general, sophisticated, and cooperative AI, which is ultimately better able to serve human needs.