Papers for

robotics programming teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Large language model agents coordinate better by reading roles and context

Theory of Scene: Breaking the Symmetry Trap in Multi-Agent LLM Coordination

Abstract: Multi-agent systems built on large language models (LLMs) are largely homogeneous, as their agents behave alike even across distinct LLMs. We show that when such agents act concurrently without communication, they collide on targets they must split and diverge on targets they must take together, a double failure we term the symmetry trap. Theory of Mind (ToM), widely used for coordination without communication, cannot escape this trap, since homogeneous agents form the same prediction of one another and respond to it in the same way. We propose Theory of Scene (ToS), a training-free reasoning schema in which each agent reads its public role, the only difference between the agents, and the task context they all observe. Homogeneous agents thereby derive one division of labor, each taking the part its role fixes, which turns homogeneity from the cause of the trap into the cure. ToS reads the role together with the scene through role gating, which determines whether ownership overlaps or is already divided, and the task context through task coupling, which infers whether the team must converge on each target, divide it, or take its stages in turn. We evaluate on DivvyBench, a controlled environment we introduce, whose target types make an episode Competitive, Cooperative, or Mixed across Tabletop, Airspace, and Household scenarios, and on two established agentic benchmarks, GovSim and Overcooked. ToS outperforms all six baselines on every benchmark, and each baseline falls far behind it in at least one setting. Against ToM given the same inputs, ToS raises the DivvyBench success rate from 71.1% to 99.6%, the GovSim total gain from 207 to 400, and the Overcooked level-normalized throughput from 1.41 to 1.67.

Sat 26 SeptMachine LearningComputation and LanguageMultiagent Systems
The gist
When many AI agents modeled on large language models (LLMs) try to work together without talking, they often fail: they either fight over tasks that should be shared or split tasks that must be done together. The authors call this problem the symmetry trap. They show that a common method, Theory of Mind, can’t fix this because all agents think alike. Instead, they propose Theory of Scene, where each agent uses its unique role and the shared environment to decide who does what, improving coordination. Their method works better than existing ones in several test scenarios including teamwork and competition.
Open → 2609.32939v1