# High-fidelity social learning via shared episodic memories enhances collaborative foraging through mnemonic convergence

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.20271 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20271/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [Prioritized Experience Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05952/) (2015)
- [Neural Episodic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01988/) (2017)
- [Model-Free Episodic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.04460/) (2016)
- [A multi-agent reinforcement learning model of common-pool resource appropriation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06600/) (2017)
- [Autocurricula and the Emergence of Innovation from Social Interaction: A Manifesto for Multi-Agent Intelligence Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.00742/) (2019)
- [Episodic Memory Deep Q-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.07603/) (2018)
- [The Emergence of Consensus: A Primer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.07767/) (2017)
- [Social Network Structure Shapes Innovation: Experience-sharing in RL with SAPIENS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.05060/) (2022)
- [Towards sample-efficient episodic control with DAC-ML](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.13779/) (2020)
- [Discretization of continuous input spaces in the hippocampal autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14600/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Social learning, a cornerstone of cultural evolution, enables individuals to acquire knowledge by observing and imitating others. At the heart of its efficacy lies episodic memory, which encodes specific behavioral sequences to facilitate learning and decision-making. This study explores the interrelation between episodic memory and social learning in collective foraging. Using Sequential Episodic Control (SEC) agents capable of sharing complete behavioral sequences stored in episodic memory, we investigate how variations in the frequency and fidelity of social learning influence collaborative foraging performance. Furthermore, we analyze the effects of social learning on the content and distribution of episodic memories across the group. High-fidelity social learning is shown to consistently enhance resource collection efficiency and distribution, with benefits sustained across memory lengths. In contrast, low-fidelity learning fails to outperform nonsocial learning, spreading diverse but ineffective mnemonic patterns. Novel analyses using mnemonic metrics reveal that high-fidelity social learning also fosters mnemonic group alignment and equitable resource distribution, while low-fidelity conditions increase mnemonic diversity without translating to performance gains. Additionally, we identify an optimal range for episodic memory length in this task, beyond which performance plateaus. These findings underscore the critical effects of social learning on mnemonic group alignment and distribution and highlight the potential of neurocomputational models to probe the cognitive mechanisms driving cultural evolution.