arXiv AI By Constantin Ruhdorfer, Matteo Bortoletto, Johannes Forkel, Jakob Foerster, Andreas Bulling

The Yokai Learning Environment: Tracking Beliefs Over Space and Time

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arXiv:2508. 12480v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The ability to cooperate with unknown partners is a central challenge in cooperative AI and widely studied in the form of zero-shot coordination (ZSC), which evaluates an algorithm by measuring the performance of independently trained agents when paired.

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arXiv AI
Sep 12

The Convention Gap: Towards Measuring Implicit Communication in Cooperative AI Evaluation

The paper introduces the "convention gap" as a metric for measuring implicit communication in cooperative AI, defined as the difference between predicted failure probability from literal messages and observed failure rates. Using the card game Hanabi, the authors analyze 101,000 play actions from human-human, AI-AI, and human-AI datasets, finding a +26.2pp gap in human pairs, a -0.7pp gap in AI pairs, and a +16.4pp gap in human-AI pairs, with the largest gaps occurring on plays with no hints. The study shows that convention compatibility, rather than raw AI-AI performance, may better predict an AI’s effectiveness with human partners.

By Makoto Fukushima, Hua-Dong Xiong, Ehsan Moradi Pari
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 16

Probing Dec-POMDP Reasoning in Cooperative MARL

arXiv:2602. 20804v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is typically framed as a decentralised partially observable Markov decision process (Dec-POMDP), a setting whose hardness stems from two key challenges: partial observability and decentralised coordination.

By Kale-ab Tessera, Leonard Hinckeldey, Riccardo Zamboni, David Abel, Amos Storkey
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Benchmarking the Limits of In-Context Reinforcement Learning for Ad-Hoc Teamwork

The paper introduces ICRL4AHT, a large-scale benchmark for evaluating In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL) in Ad-Hoc Teamwork (AHT) scenarios using Overcooked-V2. It provides a diverse teammate suite, a reproducible pipeline, and evaluates history-conditioned ICRL algorithms such as Algorithm Distillation and Decision-Pretrained Transformer. The results show that these methods often perform worse than random baselines and do not improve with longer horizons, underscoring the difficulty of strategic inference under partial observability in AHT.

By Yuheng Jing, Kai Li, Ziwen Zhang, Jiajun Zhang, Zeyao Ma, Jiaxi Yang, Lei Zhang, Zhe Wu, Jinmin He, Junliang Xing, Jian Cheng