Zero-shot coordination (ZSC) aims to enable agents to cooperate with independently trained partners without prior interaction, a key requirement for real-world multi-agent systems and human-AI collaboration. Existing approaches have largely emphasized increasing partner diversity during training, yet such strategies often fall short of achieving reliable generalization to unseen partners. We introduce State-Blocked Coordination (SBC), a simple yet effective framework that improves ZSC by inducing diverse interaction scenarios without direct environment modification. Specifically, SBC generates a family of virtual environments through state blocking, allowing agents to experience a wide range of suboptimal partner policies. Across multiple benchmarks, SBC demonstrates superior performance in zero-shot coordination, including strong generalization to human partners.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.11688,
title = {Shaping Zero-Shot Coordination via State Blocking},
author = {Mingu Kang and Sunwoo Lee and Yonghyeon Jo and Seungyul Han},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.11688},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
9 technical page followed by references and appendix