{"pk":29495,"title":"Too many cooks: Coordinating multi-agent collaboration through inverse planning","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Collaboration requires agents to coordinate their behavior onthe fly, sometimes cooperating to solve a single task togetherand other times dividing it up into sub-tasks to work on in par-allel. Underlying the human ability to collaborate is theory-of-mind, the ability to infer the hidden mental states that driveothers to act. Here, we develop Bayesian Delegation, a decen-tralized multi-agent learning mechanism with these abilities.Bayesian Delegation enables agents to rapidly infer the hid-den intentions of others by inverse planning. These inferencesenable agents to flexibly decide in the absence of communi-cation when to cooperate on the same sub-task and when towork on different sub-tasks in parallel. We test this model ina suite of multi-agent Markov decision processes inspired bycooking problems. To succeed, agents must coordinate boththeir high-level plans (e.g., what sub-task they should work on)and their low-level actions (e.g., avoiding collisions). BayesianDelegation bridges these two levels and rapidly aligns agents’beliefs about who should work on what. Finally, we testedBayesian Delegation in a behavioral experiment where partici-pants made sub-task inferences from sparse observations of co-operative behavior. Bayesian Delegation outperformed heuris-tic models and was closely aligned with human judgments.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"coordination; social learning; inverse planning;Bayesian inference"}],"section":"Agend-based Models","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7zk0m8cz","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Sarah","middle_name":"A.","last_name":"Wu","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""},{"first_name":"Rose","middle_name":"E.","last_name":"Wang","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""},{"first_name":"James","middle_name":"A.","last_name":"Evans","name_suffix":"","institution":"UChicago","department":""},{"first_name":"Joshua","middle_name":"B.","last_name":"Tenenbaum","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""},{"first_name":"David","middle_name":"C.","last_name":"Parkes","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard","department":""},{"first_name":"Max","middle_name":"","last_name":"Kleiman-Weiner","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard, MIT , Diffeo","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2020-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/29495/galley/19355/download/"}]}