SAVOIR: Learning Social Savoir-Faire via Shapley-based Reward Attribution

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.18982v1
• Date: Tue, 21 Apr 2026 02:08:25 GMT
• Title: SAVOIR: Learning Social Savoir-Faire via Shapley-based Reward Attribution
• Abstract summary: Social intelligence, the ability to navigate complex interpersonal interactions, presents a fundamental challenge for language agents.<n>Existing approaches directly employ language models to distribute episode-level rewards, yielding attributions that are retrospective and lack theoretical grounding.<n>We propose SAVOIR, a novel principled framework grounded in cooperative game theory.
• Score: 82.31558282651811
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Social intelligence, the ability to navigate complex interpersonal interactions, presents a fundamental challenge for language agents. Training such agents via reinforcement learning requires solving the credit assignment problem: determining how individual utterances contribute to multi-turn dialogue outcomes. Existing approaches directly employ language models to distribute episode-level rewards, yielding attributions that are retrospective and lack theoretical grounding. We propose SAVOIR (ShApley Value fOr SocIal RL), a novel principled framework grounded in cooperative game theory. Our approach combines two complementary principles: expected utility shifts evaluation from retrospective attribution to prospective valuation, capturing an utterance's strategic potential for enabling favorable future trajectories; Shapley values ensure fair credit distribution with axiomatic guarantees of efficiency, symmetry, and marginality. Experiments on the SOTOPIA benchmark demonstrate that SAVOIR achieves new state-of-the-art performance across all evaluation settings, with our 7B model matching or exceeding proprietary models including GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Notably, even large reasoning models consistently underperform, suggesting social intelligence requires qualitatively different capabilities than analytical reasoning.

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