Reinforcement Learning with Comparative Evidence for Social Intelligence

Keane Ong, Yuriel Ryan, Sabri Boughorbel, Vladimir Necula, Jack Wei Lun Shi +7

Developing socially intelligent AI remains heavily dependent on human-annotated data, limiting the scale and breadth of social understanding models can acquire. Methods that derive training signals from unlabeled data offer a path beyond this dependence, but social predictions lack the verification oracles available in mathematics and coding. Moreover, core social targets such as affect, intent, preference, and pragmatic meaning are often ambiguous. The same behavior can support multiple plausible interpretations, making it difficult to verify which is best supported. To address this challenge, we introduce Reinforcement Learning with Comparative Evidence (RLCE), a reinforcement learning method that learns social understanding from unlabeled training data without constructing rewards from ground-truth annotations. Given distinct answers in a rollout group, RLCE constructs evidence tests that identify observable evidence favoring an answer over another, validates these tests against the input sample, and aggregates test outcomes to determine the best-supported interpretation. Tests are regenerated as the policy produces new answers, enabling them to evolve with the policy. Across…