Artificial Empathy: Towards a Framework for Unsupervised Agency Detection and Policy Reconstruction
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: We study how an AI system can identify and model other agents in its environment from observation alone, which is a capability necessary for cooperative behaviour in the real world. This problem is less constrained than inverse reinforcement learning and remains largely unexplored. We propose a framework that uses a reinforcement learning agent, trained on an independent task as a prior about agentic dynamics, to perform agency detection and policy reconstruction.
Source: arXiv (Cornell University)
Authors: Kuhn, Peter, Pang, Chris, Chauhan, Sonakshi
Language: English
Subfield: Artificial Intelligence
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204164056