A toy framework for single and multi-agent human-AI curiosity ecosystems

Abstract

This paper offers a toy framework for considering curiosity as an ecosystem. First, it suggests that a single agent's inquiry policy (how, when, and why an agent asks a question) depends on how the agent values immediate uncertainty reduction, costs, delayed return, and the value of keeping the question open. A key concept in the framework is that the weights on these decision-related terms can change with experience. For example, a period of cheap, quickly answered questions may change the cost of inquiry on a short timescale and change which kinds of questions the agent is drawn to answer over a longer timescale. Second, these ideas are extended to many agents exploring a shared knowledge landscape, and there the framework tracks inquiry volume, topic diversity, frontier-directed inquiry, redundancy, and reusable knowledge. The result is a conceptual toy framework for studying curiosity ecology and for future efforts towards designing multi-agent AI systems for discovery. It serves as a companion piece for a paper currently under review in Trends in Neurosciences.