# Empathic Autonomous Agents

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a theoretical framework and prototype for empathic autonomous agents capable of identifying and resolving conflicts of interest through shared values and utility comparison, enhancing multi-agent interactions.

## Contribution

It presents a novel empathic agent framework with a reasoning-loop architecture and a prototype implementation for conflict resolution in autonomous systems.

## Key findings

- Framework effectively identifies potential conflicts of interest.
- Prototype demonstrates practical implementation of empathic reasoning.
- Shared values facilitate acceptable conflict resolution among agents.

## Abstract

Identifying and resolving conflicts of interests is a key challenge when designing autonomous agents. For example, such conflicts often occur when complex information systems interact persuasively with humans and are in the future likely to arise in non-human agent-to-agent interaction. We introduce a theoretical framework for an empathic autonomous agent that proactively identifies potential conflicts of interests in interactions with other agents (and humans) by considering their utility functions and comparing them with its own preferences using a system of shared values to find a solution all agents consider acceptable. To illustrate how empathic autonomous agents work, we provide running examples and a simple prototype implementation in a general-purpose programing language. To give a high-level overview of our work, we propose a reasoning-loop architecture for our empathic agent.