Implicitly Aligning Humans and Autonomous Agents through Shared Task Abstractions

Abstract: In collaborative tasks, autonomous agents fall short of humans in their capability to quickly adapt to new and unfamiliar teammates. We posit that a limiting factor for zero-shot coordination is the lack of shared task abstractions, a mechanism humans rely on to implicitly align with teammates. To address this gap, we introduce HA$^2$: Hierarchical Ad Hoc Agents, a framework leveraging hierarchical reinforcement learning to mimic the structured approach humans use in collaboration. We evaluate HA$^2$ in the Overcooked environment, demonstrating statistically significant improvement over existing baselines when paired with both unseen agents and humans, providing better resilience to environmental shifts, and outperforming all state-of-the-art methods.