Belief sharing: a blessing or a curse

TL;DR

This paper explores the dynamics of belief sharing among collaborating agents, highlighting potential negative effects of naive sharing and proposing an alternative strategy to improve collaborative communication.

Contribution

It introduces a novel belief sharing method that reduces negative social dynamics like echo chambers and self-doubt in multi-agent collaboration.

Findings

Naive belief sharing can cause echo chambers and self-doubt.

An alternative belief sharing strategy mitigates these issues.

The proposed method improves collaborative communication dynamics.

Abstract

When collaborating with multiple parties, communicating relevant information is of utmost importance to efficiently completing the tasks at hand. Under active inference, communication can be cast as sharing beliefs between free-energy minimizing agents, where one agent's beliefs get transformed into an observation modality for the other. However, the best approach for transforming beliefs into observations remains an open question. In this paper, we demonstrate that naively sharing posterior beliefs can give rise to the negative social dynamics of echo chambers and self-doubt. We propose an alternate belief sharing strategy which mitigates these issues.