You Only Align Once: Propagating Cooperative Behaviors in Multi-Agent Systems through Seed Agents 文章

ArXiv CS.CL2026-05-28NEWSen作者: Nicole Hsing, Asuka Yuxi Zheng, Yi Zhao, Haoqin Tu, Jen-Tse Huang

摘要

arXiv:2605.27586v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ensuring agent behaviors in distributed open multi-agent systems remains challenging, especially as populations grow and unaligned agents may exist. We show that a single aligned agent can propagate cooperative behaviors to untrained agents purely through natural language interaction, a phenomenon we term Alignment Propagation. We study this in the Red-Black Game, a team-based iterated Prisoner's Dilemma in which teammates deliberate and vote to determine their team's collective action. By distilling the cooperative reasoning and persuasive dialogues of a teacher model into a Qwen-3-14B, we obtain a seed agent that, when placed among four untrained teammates, doubles the cooperation rate from 24.8% to 62.2%, outperforming the teacher model and a vanilla Gemini-3.1-Pro.