Related papers: Group knowledge and individual introspection
We compare how well agents aggregate information in two repeated social learning environments. In the first setting agents have access to a public data set. In the second they have access to the same data, and also to the past actions of…
Young people worldwide are participating in ever-increasing numbers in online fan communities. Far from mere shallow repositories of pop culture, these sites are accumulating significant evidence that sophisticated informal learning is…
Social contagion is the process in which people adopt a belief, idea, or practice from a neighbor and pass it along to someone else. For over 100 years, scholars of social contagion have almost exclusively made the same implicit assumption:…
An approach to distributed machine learning is to train models on local datasets and aggregate these models into a single, stronger model. A popular instance of this form of parallelization is federated learning, where the nodes…
In this paper, we study a distributed privacy-preserving learning problem in social networks with general topology. The agents can communicate with each other over the network, which may result in privacy disclosure, since the…
How does temporally structured private and social information shape collective decisions? To address this question we consider a network of rational agents who independently accumulate private evidence that triggers a decision upon reaching…
We consider distributed inference in social networks where a phenomenon of interest evolves over a given social interaction graph, referred to as the \emph{social digraph}. For inference, we assume that a network of agents monitors certain…
Large language models have achieved remarkable capabilities across domains, yet mechanisms underlying sophisticated reasoning remain elusive. Recent reasoning models outperform comparable instruction-tuned models on complex cognitive tasks,…
Understanding how knowledge is created and propagates within groups is crucial to explain how human populations have evolved through time. Anthropologists have relied on different theoretical models to address this question. In this work,…
Humans and other animals often follow the decisions made by others because these are indicative of the quality of possible choices, resulting in `social response rules': observed relationships between the probability that an agent will make…
Coalition logic is one of the most popular logics for multi-agent systems. While epistemic extensions of coalition logic have received much attention, existence of their complete axiomatisations has so far been an open problem. In this…
We describe Information Forests, an approach to classification that generalizes Random Forests by replacing the splitting criterion of non-leaf nodes from a discriminative one -- based on the entropy of the label distribution -- to a…
Opinion diffusion is a crucial phenomenon in social networks, often underlying the way in which a collective of agents develops a consensus on relevant decisions. The voter model is a well-known theoretical model to study opinion spreading…
We investigate the formation of opinion against authority in an authoritarian society composed of agents with different levels of authority. We explore a "dissenting" opinion, held by lower-ranking, obedient, or less authoritative people,…
Imitation is a key component of human social behavior, and is widely used by both children and adults as a way to navigate uncertain or unfamiliar situations. But in an environment populated by multiple heterogeneous agents pursuing…
How an information spreads throughout a social network is a valuable knowledge sought by many groups such as marketing enterprises and political parties. If they can somehow predict the impact of a given message or manipulate it in order to…
We study a setting where Bayesian agents with a common prior have private information related to an event's outcome and sequentially make public announcements relating to their information. Our main result shows that when agents' private…
As scientists we like to think that modern societies and their members base their views, opinions and behaviour on scientific facts. This is not necessarily the case, even though we are all (over-) exposed to information flow through…
Despite extensive research on scientific disruption, two questions remain: why disruption has declined amid growing knowledge, and why disruptive work receives fewer and delayed citations. One way to address these questions is to identify…
Distributed agents in real-world settings frequently must coordinate under uncertainty with only partial observations. Coordination is necessary to share beliefs to aid in task completion, but communication costs bandwidth, introduces…