# Multi-Agent Empowerment and Emergence of Complex Behavior in Groups

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21155 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.21155/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Concrete Problems in AI Safety](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06565/) (2016)
- [Large Language Model based Multi-Agents: A Survey of Progress and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01680/) (2024)
- [Diversity is All You Need: Learning Skills without a Reward Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06070/) (2018)
- [Multi-Agent Collaboration Mechanisms: A Survey of LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.06322/) (2025)
- [Dynamics-Aware Unsupervised Discovery of Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01657/) (2019)
- [Variational Intrinsic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07507/) (2016)
- [URLB: Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15191/) (2021)
- [Empowerment -- an Introduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1310.1863/) (2013)
- [Avoiding Side Effects By Considering Future Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.07877/) (2020)
- [Can a MISL Fly? Analysis and Ingredients for Mutual Information Skill Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.08021/) (2024)
- [Intrinsic Motivation in Dynamical Control Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00005/) (2022)
- [Intrinsically motivated collective motion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.08097/) (2019)
- [Convergence of Iterative Water-Filling in Multi-User Non-Cooperative Power Control: A Comprehensive Analysis for Sequential, Simultaneous, and Asynchronous Schemes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15783/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Intrinsic motivations are receiving increasing attention, i.e. behavioral incentives that are not engineered, but emerge from the interaction of an agent with its surroundings. In this work we study the emergence of behaviors driven by one such incentive, empowerment, specifically in the context of more than one agent. We formulate a principled extension of empowerment to the multi-agent setting, and demonstrate its efficient calculation. We observe that this intrinsic motivation gives rise to characteristic modes of group-organization in two qualitatively distinct environments: a pair of agents coupled by a tendon, and a controllable Vicsek flock. This demonstrates the potential of intrinsic motivations such as empowerment to not just drive behavior for only individual agents but also higher levels of behavioral organization at scale.