Related papers: Shedding light on social learning
Why is our society multicultural? Based on the two mechanisms of homophily and social influence, the classical model for the dissemination of cultures proposed by Axelrod predicts the existence of a fragmented regime where different…
A universal feature of human societies is the adoption of systems of rules and norms in the service of cooperative ends. How can we build learning agents that do the same, so that they may flexibly cooperate with the human institutions they…
Societies change through time, entailing changes in behaviors and institutions. We ask how social change occurs when behaviors and institutions are interdependent. We model a group-structured society in which the transmission of individual…
Advances in artificial intelligence often stem from the development of new environments that abstract real-world situations into a form where research can be done conveniently. This paper contributes such an environment based on ideas…
When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed excludability.…
Humans are remarkably adept at collaboration, able to infer the strengths and weaknesses of new partners in order to work successfully towards shared goals. To build AI systems with this capability, we must first understand its building…
Communities are an important feature of social networks. In fact, it seems that communities are necessary for a social network to be efficient. However, there exist very few formal studies of the actual role of communities in social…
Imitation is an important learning heuristic in animal and human societies. Previous explorations report that the fate of individuals with cooperative strategies is sensitive to the protocol of imitation, leading to a conundrum about how…
Biological intelligence can learn to solve many diverse tasks in a data efficient manner by re-using basic knowledge and skills from one task to another. Furthermore, many of such skills are acquired without explicit supervision in an…
Social learning plays an important role in the development of human intelligence. As children, we imitate our parents' speech patterns until we are able to produce sounds; we learn from them praising us and scolding us; and as adults, we…
In social learning, agents form their opinions or beliefs about certain hypotheses by exchanging local information. This work considers the recent paradigm of weak graphs, where the network is partitioned into sending and receiving…
In this paper, we propose an agent-based model of information spread, grounded on psychological insights on the formation and spread of beliefs. In our model, we consider a network of individuals who share two opposing types of information…
Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as…
Many tasks in AI require the collaboration of multiple agents. Typically, the communication protocol between agents is manually specified and not altered during training. In this paper we explore a simple neural model, called CommNet, that…
Formal modelling provides a toolkit for understanding cultural dynamics, from individual decisions to recurring patterns of change. This chapter explains what models are and why they matter. Using a precise, shared language, they aid…
This work studies the intersection of continual and federated learning, in which independent agents face unique tasks in their environments and incrementally develop and share knowledge. We introduce a mathematical framework capturing the…
Creativity is viewed as one of the most important skills in the context of future-of-work. In this paper, we explore how the dynamic (self-organizing) nature of social networks impacts the fostering of creative ideas. We run 6 trials…
It has been argued that semantic systems reflect pressure for efficiency, and a current debate concerns the cultural evolutionary process that produces this pattern. We consider efficiency as instantiated in the Information Bottleneck (IB)…
Excess individual creativity can be detrimental to society because creators invest in unproven ideas at the expense of propagating proven ones. Moreover, a proportion of individuals can benefit from creativity without being creative…
Humans use language to collectively execute abstract strategies besides using it as a referential tool for identifying physical entities. Recently, multiple attempts at replicating the process of emergence of language in artificial agents…