about
Nested Training for Mutual Adaptation in Human-AI Teaming (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule 212 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Agents are trained in stacked levels, each playing adaptive teammates from the level below, so they learn to adjust instead of locking into tricks that only their partners understand. In a cooking game it beat fixed-partner training with new adaptive teammates and real people.

Abstract · NestRL: A Nested Training Regime for Mutual Adaptation in Human-AI Teaming

Mutual adaptation is a central challenge in human-AI teaming, as humans naturally adjust their strategies in response to an AI agent's behavior. Existing approaches attempt to approximate human behavior by diversifying training partners; however, these partners are typically static and fail to capture the adaptive nature of human teammates. When agents are trained jointly in standard multi-agent settings, they often converge to opaque coordination strategies that work only with their co-trained partners, leading to poor generalization. To model adaptive human behavior, we formulate human-AI teaming as an Interactive Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (I-POMDP). We propose NestRL, a nested training regime that learns the solution to a finite-level I-POMDP by training agents at each level against adaptive agents from the level below. This exposes agents to adaptive behavior while preventing emergence of opaque coordination strategies. We provide theoretical analysis showing that NestRL agents avoid convergence to partner-specific strategies, and validate this empirically in the Overcooked domain against state-of-the-art baselines. NestRL achieves higher task performance with both unseen adaptive agents and real human teammates, while exhibiting significantly greater adaptability over the course of interaction.

Upasana Biswas, Durgesh Kalwar, Subbarao Kambhampati, Sarath Sreedharan
arXiv:2602.17737 · cs.RO, cs.LG, cs.MA · submitted Feb 18, 2026 · updated Jun 1, 2026
abstract · pdf · html

add comment on HN