Beyond Partner Diversity: An Influence-Based Team Steering Framework for Zero-Shot Human-Machine Teaming

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 14 May 2026] Beyond Partner Diversity: An Influence-Based Team Steering Framework for Zero-Shot Human-Machine Teaming Wei Sheng, Rohan Paleja While AI agents are rapidly advancing from isolated tools to interactive collaborators, data-driven human-machine teaming (HMT) methods remain costly in their reliance on human interaction data across domains, teammates, and team sizes. Zero-shot coordination (ZSC) addresses this bottleneck by simulating diverse partner populations to approximate how unseen partners might behave. However, partner coverage alone is insufficient as team settings scale and communication becomes degraded. To remedy this deficiency, we propose Influence-Based Team Steering (IBTS), a framework that uses influence shaping to incentivize agents to discover diverse, high-performing team interaction patterns and further steers ongoing trajectories toward stronger learned coordination modes. We assess IBTS on Overcooked-AI in both two-agent and three-agent settings, allowing us to test whether learned coordination structure transfers beyond dyadic interaction. Our evaluation includes simulated partners, synthetic partner-style variation, and, to our knowledge, the first 30-subject Overcooked-AI HMT study involving two real human teammates and one machine teammate. Across these evaluations, IBTS improves team performance against competing baselines, highlighting the need for scaled ZSC to combine sparse-reward coordination mechanisms with partner-variation coverage rather than relying on diversity alone. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2605.15400 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2605.15400v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2605.15400 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Wei Sheng [view email] [v1] Thu, 14 May 2026 20:34:16 UTC (1,590 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-05 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)