Learning social norms enhances compatibility in dynamic human-AI coordination

arXiv cs.AI Papers

Summary

This paper investigates how AI agents can learn explicit social norms from human behavior to improve coordination in dynamic interactions, using pedestrian-vehicle scenarios as a testbed. The proposed norm-informed LLM outperforms baselines and human-human interactions by a significant margin.

arXiv:2607.07021v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Humans continuously coordinate with others in dynamic interactions, often through implicit, hard-to-quantify social norms that act as shared tacit expectations among interacting agents. As AI agents, including large language models (LLMs), become embedded in daily life, they increasingly participate in such interactions and reshape social interaction structures. Yet they often fail to coordinate with humans in an effective, considerate, and natural manner. We hypothesize that this gap arises because existing approaches align model behavior with human demonstrations without explicitly quantifying the underlying norms that generate such behavior. We selected pedestrian-vehicle interaction as a representative dynamic interaction and developed a simplified experimental platform that captures its key interactive features. From 3,456 dynamic human interactions collected via this platform, we identified three principles underlying human social norms: outcome predictability, value alignment, and advantage awareness. Incorporating these principles into AI agents significantly improves human-AI coordination. In the closed-loop interaction task with humans, the social-norm-informed LLM achieved a nearly fourfold higher total score than the baseline strategy and outperformed human-human interactions by 43%. These findings indicate that formalizing tacit social norms into explicit, quantifiable principles can enable AI agents to achieve mutually beneficial coordination in dynamic interactions, supporting their more natural integration into human society.
Original Article
View Cached Full Text

Cached at: 07/09/26, 07:55 AM

# Learning social norms enhances compatibility in dynamic human-AI coordination
Source: [https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07021](https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.07021)
[View PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2607.07021)

> Abstract:Humans continuously coordinate with others in dynamic interactions, often through implicit, hard\-to\-quantify social norms that act as shared tacit expectations among interacting agents\. As AI agents, including large language models \(LLMs\), become embedded in daily life, they increasingly participate in such interactions and reshape social interaction structures\. Yet they often fail to coordinate with humans in an effective, considerate, and natural manner\. We hypothesize that this gap arises because existing approaches align model behavior with human demonstrations without explicitly quantifying the underlying norms that generate such behavior\. We selected pedestrian\-vehicle interaction as a representative dynamic interaction and developed a simplified experimental platform that captures its key interactive features\. From 3,456 dynamic human interactions collected via this platform, we identified three principles underlying human social norms: outcome predictability, value alignment, and advantage awareness\. Incorporating these principles into AI agents significantly improves human\-AI coordination\. In the closed\-loop interaction task with humans, the social\-norm\-informed LLM achieved a nearly fourfold higher total score than the baseline strategy and outperformed human\-human interactions by 43%\. These findings indicate that formalizing tacit social norms into explicit, quantifiable principles can enable AI agents to achieve mutually beneficial coordination in dynamic interactions, supporting their more natural integration into human society\.

## Submission history

From: Yi Yang \[[view email](https://arxiv.org/show-email/96e94c86/2607.07021)\] **\[v1\]**Wed, 8 Jul 2026 05:39:08 UTC \(2,427 KB\)

Similar Articles

Reading the Room: Foundations, Design, and Challenges of Normative Competence in LLMs

arXiv cs.AI

This paper introduces 'normative competence'—the ability of LLM agents to discern community-enforced norms from interaction alone—and evaluates it via a multi-agent debate setting with synthetic norms. Baseline LLMs fail to learn norms even when beneficial, and norm-following shows poor generalizability, with agents exhibiting unselective attribution by copying idiosyncratic noise alongside true norms.

AI agents reshape consensus formation in human groups

arXiv cs.CL

This research investigates how LLM agents influence consensus formation in mixed human-AI groups, identifying three regimes where agent proportions alter convergence strength and the semantic nature of consensus.