Individualized Mutual Adaptation in Human-Agent Teams

The ability to collaborate with previously unseen human teammates is crucial for artificial agents to be effective in human-agent teams (HATs). Due to individual differences and complex team dynamics, it is hard to develop a single agent policy to match all potential teammates. In this article, we study both human-human and HAT in a dyadic cooperative task, Team Space Fortress. Results show that the team performance is influenced by both players’ individual skill level and their ability to collaborate with different teammates by adopting complementary policies. Based on human-human team results, we propose an adaptive agent that identifies different human policies and assigns a complementary partner policy to optimize team performance. The adaptation method relies on a novel similarity metric to infer human policy and then selects the most complementary policy from a pretrained library of exemplar policies. We conducted human-agent experiments to evaluate the adaptive agent and examine mutual adaptation in HAT. Results show that both human adaptation and agent adaptation contribute to team performance.