# Homeostatic Coupling for Prosocial Behavior

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.12894 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.12894/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [High-Dimensional Continuous Control Using Generalized Advantage Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02438/) (2015)
- [Learning to Communicate with Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06676/) (2016)
- [Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning in Sequential Social Dilemmas](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.03037/) (2017)
- [Imitation and Mirror Systems in Robots through Deep Modality Blending Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08422/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Prosociality by Coupling, Not Mere Observation: Homeostatic Sharing in an Inspectable Recurrent Artificial Life Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10760/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

When regarding the suffering of others, we often experience personal distress and feel compelled to helpfootnotePreprint. Under review.. Inspired by living systems, we investigate the emergence of prosocial behavior among autonomous agents that are motivated by homeostatic self-regulation. We perform multi-agent reinforcement learning, treating each agent as a vulnerable homeostat charged with maintaining its own well-being. We introduce an empathy-like mechanism to share homeostatic states between agents: an agent can either observe their partner's internal state (bf cognitive empathy) or the agent's internal state can be directly coupled to that of their partner (bf affective empathy). In three simple multi-agent environments, we show that prosocial behavior arises only under homeostatic coupling - when the distress of a partner can affect one's own well-being. Additionally, we show that empathy can be learned: agents can ``decode" their partner's external emotive states to infer the partner's internal homeostatic states. Assuming some level of physiological similarity, agents reference their own emotion-generation functions to invert the mapping from outward display to internal state. Overall, we demonstrate the emergence of prosocial behavior when homeostatic agents learn to ``read" the emotions of others and then to empathize, or feel as they feel.