Learning social norms enhances compatibility in dynamic human-AI coordination

Yi Yang, Siyuan Liu, Xin Gao, Huamu Sun, Chao Liu, Qing Zhou, Bingbing Nie

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.