ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Robot. AI
Sec. Computational Intelligence in Robotics
Volume 12 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/frobt.2025.1599676
Incentivising cooperation by judging a group's performance by its weakest member in neuroevolution and reinforcement learning
Provisionally accepted- 1Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan, United States
- 2Dalarna University, Falun, Dalarna, Sweden
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Autonomous agents that act with each other on behalf of humans are becoming more common in many social domains, such as customer service, transportation, and health care. In such social situations, greedy strategies can reduce the positive outcome for all agents, such as leading to stop-and-go traffic on highways or causing a denial of service on a communications channel.Instead, we desire autonomous decision-making for efficient performance while also considering the equitability of the group to avoid these pitfalls. Unfortunately, in complex situations, it is far easier to design machine learning objectives for selfish strategies than for equitable behaviors.Here we present a simple way to reward groups of agents in both evolution and reinforcement learning domains by the performance of their weakest member. We show how this yields "fairer" more equitable behavior while also maximizing individual outcomes, and we show the relationship to biological selection mechanisms of group-level selection and inclusive fitness theory.
Keywords: cooperation, reinforcement learning, neuroevolution, Inclusive fitness, group-level selection, fairness, Reward schemes
Received: 25 Mar 2025; Accepted: 08 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Schossau, Shirmohammadi and Hintze. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Arend Hintze, Dalarna University, Falun, 791 88, Dalarna, Sweden
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