Cognitively Constrained Partners for Zero-Shot Coordination in Real-Time Partitioned Control

arXiv:2610.31726v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective human-machine teaming requires agents that coordinate with unpredictable human partners. Reinforcement learning from live human feedback or large behavioural datasets is expensive, while purely simulated training overfits to artificial conventions and fails at Zero-Shot Coordination with real people. We propose a framework for training teaming agents against Cognitively Constrained Partners: simulated partners whose diversity emerges from procedural constraints grounded in human physiological literature, specifically reaction delays and perceptual limitations, rather than from reward shaping or historical training checkpoints. In a modified Lunar Lander environment, we report preliminary evidence that these partners play more like real people than unconstrained agents do, and that agents trained against them match the strongest cross-play baselines while being the only ones whose performance does not depend on how their training partners were generated. We also describe a human-participant study designed so that its rankings can be compared directly against cross-play, testing how well that standard evaluation predicts real human-agent teaming.

Abstract:Effective human-machine teaming requires agents that coordinate with unpredictable human partners. Reinforcement learning from live human feedback or large behavioural datasets is expensive, while purely simulated training overfits to artificial conventions and fails at Zero-Shot Coordination with real people. We propose a framework for training teaming agents against Cognitively Constrained Partners: simulated partners whose diversity emerges from procedural constraints grounded in human physiological literature, specifically reaction delays and perceptual limitations, rather than from reward shaping or historical training checkpoints. In a modified Lunar Lander environment, we report preliminary evidence that these partners play more like real people than unconstrained agents do, and that agents trained against them match the strongest cross-play baselines while being the only ones whose performance does not depend on how their training partners were generated. We also describe a human-participant study designed so that its rankings can be compared directly against cross-play, testing how well that standard evaluation predicts real human-agent teaming.

30 pages, 6 figures, 5 tables. Accepted at the NeurIPS 2026 Workshop on Human-AI Coevolution: Measuring Human-Agent Teams in the Agentic Era

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)

arXiv:2610.31726 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2610.31726v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.31726 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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Cognitively Constrained Partners for Zero-Shot Coordination in Real-Time Partitioned Control

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