Unsupervised Partner Design Enables Robust Ad-hoc Teamwork

Abstract:We introduce Unsupervised Partner Design (UPD), a population-free multi-agent reinforcement learning method for robust ad-hoc teamwork. UPD generates training partners on-the-fly and selects them adaptively based on a learnability criterion, removing the need for pre-trained partner populations or manual parameter tuning. We show that this simple mechanism enables effective partner diversity and can be extended to joint partner-environment selection when a procedural level generator is available. Across Level-Based Foraging, Overcooked-AI, and the Overcooked Generalisation Challenge, UPD consistently achieves strong performance compared to both population-based and population-free baselines. In a human-AI user study, agents trained with UPD achieve higher returns and are rated as more adaptive, more human-like, and less frustrating than all evaluated baseline methods.

Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC); Multiagent Systems (cs.MA)

arXiv:2508.06336 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2508.06336v2 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2508.06336 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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