We present a structured large-language-model (LLM) architecture for zero-shot human--robot coordination in a cooperative construction task with private goal views. Guided by a Dec-POMDP formulation, the architecture decomposes decision-making into (i) action-conditioned Theory-of-Mind (ToM) inference, (ii) hierarchical planning, (iii) conversation interpretation, (iv) action verification, and (v) feedback-based replanning. We compare the proposed method with an ablation without ToM inference and a multi-agent reinforcement-learning policy trained offline over many goal pairs. In human-participant experiments, the proposed method required fewer interaction steps and yielded higher post-interaction trust ratings than both baselines. These results suggest that systematically decomposing the team decision problem, using LLMs as tractable surrogates for otherwise intractable inference and planning computations, and retaining conventional verification for physical feasibility can improve both task coordination and the human experience.
Constructing efficient and reliable policies to assist humans is indispensable for human-AI collaboration. Existing methods mainly follow two lines of work. Most prior work relies on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to learn black-box policies, which limits interpretability and raises safety concerns. Recent methods query large language models (LLMs) at each decision step, causing slow responses and high inference costs. We propose Collaboration Policy Tree (Co-pi-tree), a closed-loop method that learns an executable policy tree consisting of a partner-behavior prediction tree and an agent-action selection tree. Co-pi-tree constructs a policy by distilling LLM reasoning into policy tree code. It then evaluates the policy through partner interaction, obtains feedback, and uses natural language to summarize the interaction feedback to improve problematic branches. Experiments in Overcooked-AI show that Co-pi-tree improves average reward by 35.4% over the baseline average, while reducing the number of LLM queries by 77.7% and test-time latency by 97.1%. Project page: https://beiwenzhang.github.io/Co-pi-tree/
In orchestrated multi-agent systems, humans often struggle to manage plans due to their complexity and limited transparency. Existing approaches rely on outcome-level supervision, where users verify only final outputs without visibility into intermediate reasoning. We formalize a design space for human-LLM co-planning interactions along three axes: mode (semantic vs. structural), scope (global vs. targeted), and level (low vs. high-level edits). We realize it in AMBIPOM, a prototype supporting process-level supervision through both semantic and structural interactions. Through a user study, we characterize how users navigate this space, revealing hybrid workflows and effort-control-risk trade-offs; through a controlled benchmark, we analyze how LLMs revise plans under varying scope and revision strategies. Our findings yield design insights for more transparent, controllable, and effective human-AI co-planning. We release code and data at https://github.com/megagonlabs/ambipom.
This paper presents a framework to prompt multi-robot teams with high-level tasks using natural language expressions. Our objective is to use the reasoning capabilities of language models in understanding and decomposing multi-robot collaboration and decision-making tasks, but in settings where such models cannot be called at deployment time. However, it is hard to specify the behavior of an individual robot from a team instruction, and have it continuously adapt to actions from other robots. This necessitates a framework with the representational capacity required by the logic and semantics of a task, and yet supports decentralized, real-time operation. We solve this dilemma by recognizing that a task can be represented as a deterministic finite automaton, and that recurrent neural networks (RNNs) can encode numerous automata. This allows us to distill the logic and sequential decompositions of sub-tasks obtained from a language model into an RNN, and align its internal states with the semantics of a given task. This leads to a tiny model that encapsulates the reasoning of the language model and can be implemented onboard. To interpret the internal state of the RNN for a decentralized execution, we train a graph neural network control policy conditioned on the hidden states of the RNN and the language embeddings. We present evaluations on simulated and real-world multi-robot tasks that require sequential and collaborative behavior by the team, demonstrating scalable, robust, real-time performance -- sites.google.com/view/prompting-teams.
Eduardo Sebastián, Nicolas Pfitzer, Ajay Shankar +1