Socialized Learning: Making Each Other Better Through Multi-Agent Collaboration

Learning new knowledge frequently occurs in our dynamically changing world, e.g., humans culturally evolve by continuously acquiring new abilities to sustain their survival, leveraging collective intelligence rather than a large number of individual attempts. The effective learning paradigm during cultural evolution is termed socialized learning (SL). Consequently, a straightforward question arises: Can multi-agent systems acquire more new abilities like humans? In contrast to most existing methods that address continual learning and multi-agent collaboration, our emphasis lies in a more challenging problem: we prioritize the knowledge in the original expert classes, and as we adeptly learn new ones, the accuracy in the original expert classes stays superior among all in a directional manner. Inspired by population genetics and cognitive science, leading to unique and complete development, we propose Multi-Agent Socialized Collaboration (MASC), which achieves SL through interactions among multiple agents. Specifically, we introduce collective collaboration and reciprocal altruism modules, organizing collaborative behaviors, promoting information sharing, and facilitating learning and knowledge interaction among individuals. We demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-agent collaboration in an extensive empirical study. Our code will be publicly available at https://github.com/yxjdarren/SL.