Elizabeth Mieczkowski will present her General Exam "Quantifying Collaborative Trade-offs with Insights from Distributed Systems" on Tuesday, May 13, 2025 at 12:00 PM in FC 008. Zoom Link: https://princeton.zoom.us/j/6756891992 Committee Members: Tom Griffiths (advisor), Benjamin Eysenbach, Wyatt Lloyd, Natalia Velez Abstract: Collaboration enables multi-agent systems to achieve goals beyond the capabilities of any single agent. However, coordination is inherently complex and dynamic. How can we identify the underlying principles that should guide the division of labor and resources in multi-agent teams, and formalize the trade-offs that emerge during collaboration? I argue that research from distributed computing systems provides a powerful interpretability framework for multi-agent collaboration. This literature focuses on building efficient, scalable, and fault-tolerant systems, while exposing fundamental constraints—such as communication overhead and consistency—when computation is shared across machines. I first extend Amdahl’s Law, which predicts how serial bottlenecks constrain parallel speedup, to naturalistic multi-agent tasks and confirm its validity in a set of human experiments. I then apply this model to large-scale MARL simulations in Overcooked, SMAC, and MPE, demonstrating that specialized policies emerge as a function of task parallelizability. Finally, I demonstrate how the model can benchmark existing algorithms and human collaborative strategies. Reading List: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12GKMv_n99TcUJvj8iua44eHGkUbQAz2hwX_zUYjY... Everyone is invited to attend the talk, and those faculty wishing to remain for the oral exam following are welcome to do so.