5/ Across 3 Overcooked-AI experiments, we find significant effects of these variables on the emergence of specialization (measured using the Jensen-Shannon divergence between agents’ action distributions), and that JSD is correlated with our measure of task parallelizability.

1/ Specialization appears in many domains, from cells 🧫 and insect colonies 🐝 to organizations 👩🏽‍🤝‍👩🏼. Inspired by this observation, research in MARL, robotics, and LLM teams often promote policy diversity, assuming specialized agents will divide tasks more effectively.

We often assume that specialized roles improve performance in multi-agent systems, but when does specialization emerge based on a given task and environment? 🧵👇

⭐️ New preprint w/ Ruaridh Mon-Williams, @neilbramley.bsky.social, Chris Lucas, @natvelali.bsky.social & @cocoscilab.bsky.social