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arXiv · 2608.23030

Artificial Empathy: Towards a Framework for Unsupervised Agency Detection and Policy Reconstruction

Peter Kuhn·Chris Pang·Sonakshi Chauhan
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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.

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Peter Kuhn, Chris Pang, Sonakshi Chauhan. 2026-08-24. Artificial Empathy: Towards a Framework for Unsupervised Agency Detection and Policy Reconstruction. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.23030

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