Emergent Behavior & Self-Organization Reading List

Curated by Mouhssine Rifaki | Stanford Electrical Engineering | Last updated August 2026

Simple local rules can yield flocking, roles, and cooperation without central control. These papers show how emergent behavior and self-organization arise in multi-agent reinforcement learning.

Emergent Behavior & Self-Organization: 10 key papers

1. Emergent Tool Use From Multi-Agent Autocurricula
   Baker et al. arXiv 2019.
2. ROMA: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Emergent Roles
   Wang et al. arXiv 2020.
3. Emergent Coordination Through Competition
   Liu et al. arXiv 2019.
4. Autocurricula and the Emergence of Innovation from Social Interaction: A Manifesto for Multi-Agent Intelligence Research
   Leibo et al. arXiv 2019.
5. Emergent Reciprocity and Team Formation from Randomized Uncertain Social Preferences
   Baker. arXiv 2020.
6. Inequity aversion improves cooperation in intertemporal social dilemmas
   Hughes et al. arXiv 2018.
7. Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning in Sequential Social Dilemmas
   Leibo et al. arXiv 2017.
8. Emergent Bartering Behaviour in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
   Johanson et al. arXiv 2022.
9. Social Influence as Intrinsic Motivation for Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning
   Jaques et al. arXiv 2018.
10. Emergent Prosociality in Multi-Agent Games Through Gifting
    Wang et al. arXiv 2021.

Related reading lists

• Communication in Multi-Agent RL
• Collective Intelligence
• Swarm RL & Collective Behavior
• Game Theory for Multi-Agent Systems
• Scaling Laws and Emergent Capabilities
• Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
• Self-Play & Population-Based Training
• Intrinsic Motivation & Empowerment