Advancing Cooperation, Coordination, and Adaptation

View a PDF of the paper titled Multi-Agent Language Models: Advancing Cooperation, Coordination, and Adaptation, by Arjun Vaithilingam Sudhakar

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Abstract:Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive zero-shot and few-shot generalization capabilities across complex natural language tasks, enabling their widespread use as virtual assistants for diverse applications such as translation and summarization. Despite being trained solely on large corpora of text without explicit supervision on author intent, LLMs appear to infer the underlying meaning of textual interactions. This raises a fundamental question: can LLMs model and reason about the intentions of others, i.e., do they possess a form of theory of mind? Understanding other’s intentions is crucial for effective collaboration, which underpins human societal success and is essential for cooperative interactions among multiple agents, including humans and autonomous systems. In this work, we investigate the theory of mind in LLMs through the lens of cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), where agents learn to collaborate via repeated interactions, mirroring human social reasoning. Our approach aims to enhance artificial agent’s ability to adapt and cooperate with both artificial and human partners. By leveraging LLM-based agents capable of natural language interaction, we move towards creating hybrid human-AI systems that can foster seamless collaboration, with broad implications for the future of human-artificial interaction.