You Only Align Once: Propagating Cooperative Behaviors in Multi-Agent Systems through Seed Agents
Ensuring aligned 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 unmodified 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 Qwen3-14B, we obtain a seed agent that, when placed among four unmodified teammates, more than doubles the ...
| Authors | Nicole Summer Hsing, Asuka Yuxi Zheng, Yi Zhao et al. |
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| Primary category | cs.MA |
| Published | 26 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 October 2026 |
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