September 29, 2025
SCI researchers including Dr. Michael Lewis, a professor with the Department of Informatics and Networked Systems; Lucia Romero, a master’s student studying information science; and SCI alum Huao Li (MSIS ’19, PhD ’25) received a Best Paper Award at a Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) Workshop.
This study, with collaborators from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Southern California, introduces TALENTS, a novel framework that enables artificial agents to adapt to human partners in real-time. The team categorized these interactions as ad-hoc teamwork experiences, which translate to high-pressure collaborative tasks. TALENTS learns to represent and categorize different teammate strategies and then dynamically adjusts to them, helping agents work more effectively with new, unfamiliar human partners.
To evaluate the approach, the team tested TALENTS in a customized version of the cooperative cooking game Overcooked, where teamwork and adaptability are essential. Given an unknown teammate’s observation, action predictions are generated which are used to infer teammate type and will find the best response using a tracking-regret minimization algorithm. Results showed that TALENTS significantly outperformed existing baselines when paired with unfamiliar human collaborators.
This recognition highlights the innovative research happening at SCI at the intersection of human-agent collaboration, machine learning, and robotics.
This also shows the connections and collaborations between SCI researchers and beyond. Li, for example, completed his PhD in Intelligent Systems at SCI, and has recently begun a new role as Postdoctoral Fellow for Engineering Excellence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Congratulations to the entire team for this outstanding achievement!