MA-UITD: Offline Multi-Agent Reward Inference for Characterizing Continuous Social Behavior

Overview & Synopsis

Multi-agent inverse reinforcement learning offers a powerful framework not only for imitation learning but also for understanding the neural computations supporting social interactions and decision-making. Inferring rewards from interacting agents is challenging because observed choices reflect both personal preferences and expectations about others. Existing methods often require additional environment interaction, repeated policy optimization as an inner loop, or restrictive assumptions about environment dynamics and action spaces, limiting their applicability to fixed behavioral datasets. We introduce Multi-Agent Unilateral Inverse Temporal Difference Learning (MA-UITD), an offline method for inferring explicit agent-specific rewards from joint demonstrations in continuous-state environments with either discrete or bounded continuous actions. Its core idea is to represent the long-term consequences of each agent's own actions through belief-conditioned successor features that average over other agents' behavior. Shared reward features and agent-specific preference vectors connect these unilateral values to the target reward function, while inverse temporal-difference consistency and noise-contrastive behavioral learning enable inference without known dynamics or an inner policy-optimization loop. Across simulated cooperative, competitive, and general-sum tasks, MA-UITD outperforms baselines in discrete-action settings and infers behaviorally compatible reward profiles in continuous-action settings. When applied to experimentally collected social-foraging trajectories, MA-UITD inferred distinct spatial and interaction-dependent reward structures for leaders and followers, providing a quantitative characterization of latent behavioral objectives that may be relevant for understanding the neural computations underlying social behavior.