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Inspired by the mechanisms of ToM, a research team led by Prof. ZENG Yi from the Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has proposed a multi-agent theory of mind spiking neural network (MAToM-SNN) which improves multi-agent cooperation and competition. The associated study was published in Patterns (https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899 (23)00126-5) on June 23.

“When AI obtain the functionality of Theory of Mind/Cognitive Empathy, it has to be inspired by the brain so that we know the Theory of Mind model in AI is comparable to the human version so that it is more trustworthy for human and society. More specifically, inspired by the neural mechanisms in the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) for mentalizing and storing information related to self and others, as well as the neural mechanisms in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) for simulating others' decisions, the proposed model consists of two modules: Self-MAToM module for inferring others based on self-experience and Other-MAToM module for inferring others based on historical observations of others. The predicted behaviors of others by MAToM-SNN provide rich state representations for the decision-making model, enabling the decision network to adjust its policies adaptively.” said Prof. ZENG Yi, corresponding author of the study.

Agents with MAToM-SNN can use their own experiences or observations of others to infer their behaviors and adjust their policies to interact better with others. Besides, MAToM-SNN enhances the performance of multi-agent systems in cooperative and competitive tasks. MAToM-SNN demonstrates high levels of generalization on multi-agent reinforcement learning tasks based on spiking neural networks and recurrent neural networks , according to ZHAO Zhuoya, the first author of the study.

“The ablation study experiments validate that MAToM-SNN helps teams with larger numbers improve performance on competitive tasks. Besides, we find that Self-MAToM helps Other-MAToM learn quickly. The self is a prerequisite for inferring others. Thus it is essential to infer about others based on self-experience when information about them is incomplete.” " said Associate Professor ZHAO Feifei, one of the authors.