Homeostatic Coupling for Prosocial Behavior

When regarding the suffering of others, we often experience personal distress and feel compelled to help. Inspired by living systems, we investigate the emergence of prosocial behavior among autonomous agents that are motivated by homeostatic self-regulation. We perform multi-agent reinforcement learning, treating each agent as a vulnerable homeostat charged with maintaining its own well-being. We introduce an empathy-like mechanism to share homeostatic states between agents: an agent can either observe their partner’s internal state (cognitive empathy) or the agent’s internal state can be directly coupled to that of their partner (affective empathy). In three simple multi-agent environments, we show that prosocial behavior arises only under homeostatic coupling – when the distress of a partner can affect one’s own well-being. Additionally, we show that empathy can be learned: agents can “decode” their partner’s external emotive states to infer the partner’s internal homeostatic states. Assuming some level of physiological similarity, agents reference their own emotion-generation functions to invert the mapping from outward display to internal state. Overall, we demonstrate the emergence of prosocial behavior when homeostatic agents learn to “read” the emotions of others and then to empathize, or feel as they feel.