EnvCraft: A Modular Environment Design Framework for Investigating Prosocial Incentives
<p dir="ltr">Developing approaches for ensuring that the collective be- haviour of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) is beneficial for all human stake- holders is a critical challenge for the safe deployment of MAS in real- world settings, where the goals of agent owners may partially confli...
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2025
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| Summary: | <p dir="ltr">Developing approaches for ensuring that the collective be- haviour of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) is beneficial for all human stake- holders is a critical challenge for the safe deployment of MAS in real- world settings, where the goals of agent owners may partially conflict. A key direction towards addressing this challenge is understanding how to reliably incentivise prosocial behaviour among self-interested learning agents with partially conflicting goals through simulation experiments. However, methods for incentivising certain behaviours can lead to un- intended consequences if the underlying influence of environmental and social pressures on behaviour are poorly understood. Avoiding side effects of behavioural incentives is challenging in the real world, where environ- mental and social pressures are dynamic and constantly changing.</p><p dir="ltr">In this paper, we present ongoing work developing EnvCraft, a framework for composing diverse multi-agent environments from modular build- ing blocks that are parametrised to enable precise control and systematic variation of environment and population conditions. We detail re- quirements of EnvCraft for supporting robust evaluation of methods for incentivising prosocial behaviour, and for characterising the relation- ships between incentives, environment conditions and learned behaviour, through systematic exploration of the environment configuration parameters.</p> |
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