Multi-Agent Empowerment and Emergence of Complex Behavior in Groups

TL;DR

This paper extends the concept of empowerment as an intrinsic motivation to multi-agent systems, demonstrating its role in fostering emergent group behaviors in different environments.

Contribution

It formulates a principled extension of empowerment for multiple agents and shows how it can lead to organized group behaviors.

Findings

Empowerment can be efficiently calculated in multi-agent settings.

Intrinsic motivation via empowerment induces organized group behaviors.

Distinct environmental setups reveal different modes of group organization.

Abstract

Intrinsic motivations are receiving increasing attention, i.e. behavioral incentives that are not engineered, but emerge from the interaction of an agent with its surroundings. In this work we study the emergence of behaviors driven by one such incentive, empowerment, specifically in the context of more than one agent. We formulate a principled extension of empowerment to the multi-agent setting, and demonstrate its efficient calculation. We observe that this intrinsic motivation gives rise to characteristic modes of group-organization in two qualitatively distinct environments: a pair of agents coupled by a tendon, and a controllable Vicsek flock. This demonstrates the potential of intrinsic motivations such as empowerment to not just drive behavior for only individual agents but also higher levels of behavioral organization at scale.